Brief:
Dr.Bell’s research interests include computational routines and tools used for the development and application of thermodynamic mixture models. These mixture models are used in software tools like NIST REFPROP, a modeling tool widely used in industry.
NIST REFPROP – The industry standard in thermophysical properties
Dr. Bell is part of the team involved in the development of NIST REFPROP. This software tool is the industry standard for thermophysical properties of pure fluids and mixtures, and is one of NIST’s flagship products. His interest is especially focused on development of interfaces to facilitate the interfacing of REFPROP with other high-level environments like python, C++, Microsoft Excel, etc.
Aside from his activities in interfacing REFPROP with other programming environments, he is also involved in developing the mixture models and mixture estimation schemes implemented in NIST REFPROP.
Development of mixture models
Dr. Bell developed a number of open-source tools based in C++ and python for carrying out parameter optimization for a wide range of mixtures. In a publication in 2016, interaction parameters for more than 1000 mixtures were fit, and efforts are continuing to develop mixture models for mixtures that employ binary mixture specific departure functions.
Algorithms for thermodynamic calculations of mixtures
Dr. Bell is actively involved the development of algorithms for mixture calculations. In this category are algorithms for the calculation of all the critical points for mixtures, phase envelope cross-sections, robust and efficient algorithms for calculating density values from multi-parameter equations of state, etc. In most cases, the code for these algorithms are provided as supplemental information along with the associated publication.
Development of open-source software tools:
In the last few years Dr. Bell has been involved in a number of open-source software projects; open-source software forms the cornerstone of replicable science.
Those projects are publicly available on NIST’s github page: