Fast calculation of material properties applied to water and steam

A method has been developed at the Electrical Engineering Laboratory of the Technikal Research Centre of Finland for computer aided generation of fast access material property tables. The desired range, and accuracy can be defined in the generation phase. The very efficient subroutines available for fast calculation of material properties for all these tables are specially developed for the applications and table look-up in simulation studies. The tables are optimized for minimum memory requirements according to the ranges and specified accuracy, taking into account that computer memory nowadays is much cheaper than computer speed. Generally applied methods to cakulate material properties are discussed. Some special features of the method developed are presented in more detail as generation of breakpoint tables, pretransformation of functions and search algorithms. Finally the application of the method specially on water and steam properties is described.