Cantera 2.6.0b2

The Cantera development team is pleased to announce the general availability of the second beta for the next release of Cantera, v2.6.0. There have been over 1300 commits to Cantera since the last version, 2.5.1, which was released in February 2021. We have closed or merged 143 pull requests and closed 90 issues. Some of the highlights for this release are:

• Major redesign of how reaction rates are handled internally to improve extensibility and enable new capabilities (E#63, E#87)
• Enable delegation of reactor implementation to user-provided Python classes (custom2.py)
• Enable serialization of Cantera objects to YAML (mechanism_reduction.py)
• Implement pickling of Python Solution objects
• Add PyPI package for Cantera, installable with pip
• Implement Peng-Robinson equation of state for real gases
• Add Blowers-Masel reaction rate parameterization for gas phase and interface kinetics (blowers-masel.py)
• Add calculation of sparse, analytical Jacobians for gas kinetics (derivative_speed.cpp)
• Add reaction rate parameterizations for plasmas with independent electron temperature

The complete list of changes can be found on the Cantera Wiki page: https://github.com/Cantera/cantera/wiki/Cantera-2.6.0-Changelog

Installation

Installation instructions for the Python module, Matlab toolbox, C++ interface, and Fortran 90 module on supported platforms are available at https://testing.cantera.org/install/index.html. Please note that as of 2022-04-11, installers for the beta are available via PyPI (using pip), the cantera conda channel, the cantera-team/cantera-unstable Ubuntu PPA, and the installers below. Additional installers will be available soon.

Contributors

This release was made possible by the following contributors: @12Chao, @BangShiuh, @blackrabbit17, @DavidAkinpelu, @anthony-walker, @band-a-prend, @bryanwweber, @chinahg, @d-e-t, @decaluwe, @g3bk47, @gkogekar, @ischoegl, @jongyoonbae, @lavdwall, @leesharma, @mefuller, @paulblum, @speth, @stijn76, @tpg2114