CoolPack

CoolPack was developed by the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MEK), Section of Thermal Energy (TES) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The development of CoolPack has until version 1.33 been financed by the Danish Energy Agency as part of the SysSim project. IPU hosts the CoolPack download pages.

The following simulation purposes are covered:

• Cycle analysis (process design)
• System sizing
• System simulation
• Component calculations
• Analysis of operating conditions
• Transient simulation (cooling of an object/room)
• Refrigerant calculations (property plots, thermodynamic & transport properties, comparison of refrigerants)
• Life cycle cost (LCC)

As indicated by the name, CoolPack is a collection of simulation programs related to refrigeration. It consists of “Refrigeration Utilities”, “EESCoolTools”, and a transient element called “Dynamic”.

The first version of Refrigeration Utilities was released in 1995 and the program has since then been updated continuously with new refrigerants, more property plots etc.

EESCoolTools has been formally introduced as part of CoolPack (March 1999). The name EESCoolTools is a combination of the three words EES, Cool and Tools:

• “EES” refers to the name of the program used to develop the simulation models (Engineering Equation Solver – EES).
• “Cool” refers to that the programs are related to the area of refrigeration.
• “Tools” refers to that the programs are thought to be tools enabling you to make faster and more detailed system design and energy analysis.

EES is developed by S. A. Klein and F .L. Alvarado, and is sold by F-Chart Software in Wisconsin, USA. You can get more information about EES and F-Chart Software on the Internet.

The dynamic elements are modeled and solved using a DAE-type simulation program called DALI. DALI was developed at the Refrigeration Laboratory (now part of Section of Thermal Energy at the Technical University of Denmark) in 1985. Originally, it was programmed in Pascal but the present release is updated to Delphi. So far we have included one transient element: simulation of the cooling of an object with the possibility of applying an on/off control of the compressor.

License

The CoolPack program is freeware and it may be distributed freely. For more information, see:

• CoolPack license summary

Download

• Download CoolPack v1.5.0
• CoolPack tutorial

Note: Versions after v1.4.7 don’t contain functional changes, but only changes related to installation of the software.

Updates and New Refrigerants

Please have a look at CoolTools for calculations with new refrigerants. It does not have all the same functionality as CoolPack has, but it comes with a lot of the new refrigerants built-in.

Unfortunately, there is no recent version of CoolPack that supports new refrigerants, nor is there a 64bit executable or a version for Mac or Linux. We do not develop CoolPack at the moment, nor do we plan to do so in the future. A large part of CoolPack is based on EES, and difficult to maintain.

Instead, we are constantly developing the CoolTools package, which has been built from scratch. The idea is to make a more modular software with different components that can be updated individually. Ideally, this new software would be supported by the community and receive continuous upgrades.

If you are interested, you can join our mailing list to get informed about the release of the new software, and to get access to early preview versions. You can sign up on https://www.ipu.dk/ at the bottom of the page, remember to select the interest category “Thermodynamics and Energy Technology”.

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