Scene

Quickstart

    • The Scene settings can be accessed on the right of the experiment builder in the Scene tab.
    • The settings available here mostly affect the simulation quality and performance of the system. If your experiments are very unstable or take a long time to compute, you might want to check these settings.

Properties

Time

Simulation step

      • Units: s
      • Troubleshooting: If you experience large noise consider decreasing this value. If your simulations take very long to compute, consider increasing it.

The physics simulation in ETHermodynamics happens in discrete time steps. This setting sets the duration of such a time step.

Increasing the length of the time steps makes the simulation faster since calculations need to be performed less often. As a rule of thumb, increasing the time step by a factor decreases the simulation duration by the same factor. Increasing it too far might break down the simulation process (a warning in the experiment viewer will tell you when this happens).

Decreasing the length of a simulation step increases the precision of the simulation, reducing noise.

Simulated Particles

Particles per mole

      • Troubleshooting: If you experience large noise consider increasing this value. If your simulations take very long to compute, consider decreasing it.

It is practically impossible to simulate the number of particles present in one mol. This parameter defines how many actual particles will be simulated for every mol of particles added to your system.

Increasing this parameter increases the precision of the simulation, reducing noise.

Decreasing this paramter speeds up the simulations significantly.

Visualized

      • Units: %

Displaying all particles that are being simulated can lead to a pretty cluttered image. This setting allows you to display only a fraction of particles (all particles are being used in physics simulation).

This setting is purely visual, it usually affects performance only marginally.

Advanced

Entropy cell number

      • Troubleshooting: If you experience a warning in the Experiment viewer about particle loss, consider increasing the size of your chamber.

The width of the chamber.

To calculate entropy, the distribution of particles in either space, their energy, or their momentum can be used.

For this purpose, the available states of the particles (e.g. the space they can occupy) are grouped into cells. This number defines how big the cells are.

Increasing this number makes the entropy calculation more precise, decreasing noise.

Note that changing the chamber volume (for spatial entropy) or the entropy cell number offsets the entropy by a constant number. So to compare entropies between experiments, keep these two numbers identical between the experiments.

Snapshot interval

      • Units: s
      • Troubleshooting: If your computer starts slowing down a lot during simulation, and/or you experience a warning about working memory, consider increasing this number (or decreasing the experiment time).

To visualize the experiment and to collect data, such as pressure, about the system, a snapshot is taken regularily.

This parameter determines how often such a snapshot is taken.

Increasing this number reduces the amount of working memory required for ETHermodynamics.

Decreasing the snapshot interval increases the time-resolution of the experiment movie and data collected.

Comment

You can add a comment to your experiment to display additional information. This comment will be displayed in the Experiment Viewer.