About Gas Dynamics Calculator

Gas Dynamic Calculator, (Potto-GDC) was created to generate various tables for the book either at end the chapters or for the exercises. This calculator was given to several individuals and they found Potto-GDC to be very useful. So, I decided to include Potto-GDC to the book.

Initially, the Potto-GDC was many small programs for specific tasks. For example, the stagnation table was one such program. Later, the code became a new program to find the root of something between the values of the tables e.g. finding parameters for a given $\fld$ . At that stage, the program changed to contain a primitive interface to provide parameters to carry out the proper calculations. Yet, then, every flow model was a different program.

When it become cumbersome to handle several programs, the author utilized the object oriented feature of C++ and assigned functions to the common tasks to a base class and the specific applications to the derived classes. Later, a need to intermediate stage of tube flow model (the PipeFlow class) was created and new classes were created.

The graphical interface was created only after the engine was written. The graphical interface was written to provide a filter for the unfamiliar user. It also remove the need to recompile the code every time.