For everyone who works in reaction kinetic and pathway, they will be very familiar with this software. Kintecus is known as a program to simulate the chemical kinetics of combustion, biological, nuclear, and air atmosphere in spreadsheet files. Putting spreadsheet as the basis of the interface is nice as most of people are familiar enough with Excel MS. Although it is written not necessary to have MS Excel, it could be better to have at least Excel viewer. The module of the program is activated via macros, so you have to set ‘low’ level of secuirity of your MS Excel.
Compare to the previous version of Kintecus, the current version is having more advantages. One of them is sensitivity analysis which is useful to filter the only important reactions occured in the global process. The command is also quite easy for using this software, for example, just put keyword: -SENSIT:1 and the program will give you a set of sensitivity calculation in each time spant. Other advantages? ofcourse as kinetic program, this software will give you the trend of species. Before doing simulation, you have to put your calculation models in one sheet named model. In this sheet, you put all of your proposed reactions or if you don’t have any idea about the reaction, just put as many as you get from other sources, for example chemkin software or GRI-Mech. The important is all reaction is order one to each reactant or product. All value of the reaction rate follows modified Arhennius equation. One good thing from this software is it considers the thermodynamic term. All properties of molecules which is has similar format with chemkin database .dat file. Even, if you are missing a molecule property, you can download or get this data from chemkin or GRI-Mech database. Just do googling to find it, it believe you can find it easily as my experience.
As the software is shareware for 10 days and you can obtain easy registration, I believe you can use it as your powerful tool to calculate your chemical reactions. The matter is just, please, spend around 20-30 minutes to understand it by read the manual. Once you know it, you will easily operate this software. The official kintecus website address is http://www.kintecus.com.
James Ianni said,
August 12, 2007 at 12:41 am
Interesting blog, just some corrections:
- If you are utilizing the Excel interface, you need only set the Macro security to Medium NOT low. You should never set the Macro Security in any of Microsofts office products to Low!
- The sensitivity analysis feature in Kintecus has been availabe since 1995 (v1.5) and it is not just a filter but a fairly powerful method to reveal most features in large chemical reaction schemes.
- Kintecus can handle any reaction order, even fractional (for global reaction schemes)
- the most popular feature is the ability to fit anything to fairly unstructured experimental data and output accurate (correct) standard deviations of those fits via advanced bootstrapping methods (this is non-existant is all other statistical software)
- also uncertainty analysis (sometimes call monte carlo analysis or six sigma analysis), cluster analysis, true global phase diagrams and equilibriums, and other neato features…
- it was primarily created in West Philly….