GLIMPS/GLOP is a commercial code available from Gedeon Associates of Athens, Ohio. GLIMPS is used for engine performance predictions; it's input format is somewhat more user-friendly than that of HFAST (Input variables are described in English, instead of the FORTRAN style variable names used for HFAST input). GLOP contains the optimization routines which permit GLIMPS/GLOP to be used for engine design optimization. GLIMPS/GLOP have also been used for performance prediction and design of cooling machines by private industry.
GLIMPS/GLOP was developed by David Gedeon of Gedeon Associates. David was the primary analyst at Sunpower, Inc. in Athens, OH before going into business for himself. A description of GLIMPS taken from (Geng and Tew, 1993) is: "GLIMPS is a constrained mode simulation that uses a globally implicit technique to solve a system of algebraic equations simultaneously. The algebraic equations are finite difference representations of the governing differential equations. GLIMPS is a one-dimensional model comprised of up to 7 components relating to the working space of a Stirling cycle machine. Each component is divided into a number of computational-cells. The computational domain is broken into discrete time nodes as well. The user specifies the number of computational-cells and time nodes used in the model."
Gedeon described an early version of his code in (Gedeon, 1986). A much more complete and up-to-date description of the code is the user manual (Gedeon, 1992), available for purchase from Gedeon Associates. Gedeon is working on a successor to GLIMPS/GLOP which he has called the SAGE code.
GLIMPS/GLOP is written in Microsoft PASCAL. Performance calculations made with GLIMPS at NASA on an IBM 286 computer required approximately two minutes (this is a function of the number of spatial nodes and time steps chosen).
For information regarding the price and availability of GLIMPS/GLOP or SAGE contact:
David Gedeon