Fien Consulting Ltd. | FienIX add-in for Excel

The FienX Toolkit for Microsoft Excel

The modelling of utility systems in Excel workbooks has a long and successful history. Models of widely (and wildly) varying complexity have been developed for decades. From modest ad-hoc calculations, to large automated models for system monitoring and optimisation, Excel offers the power and flexibility to build them.

However, the modelling task is made considerably easier by a dedicated "add-in" to extend Excel's functionality into the realms of thermodynamics and unit operations.

Our FienX add-in makes available all the most useful properties of water and steam, as well as a range of the most common unit operations found in industrial steam systems. Furthermore, it contains...

a range of functions for doing calculations on moist air, or "psychrometrics", to help analyse cooling towers or HVAC, for example.
useful calculations for gaseous and liquid fuels, to find heating value, combustion air requirements and emissions.

The charts below were entirely constructed in Excel, using only FienX functionality.

The FienX Toolkit uses water and steam property calculations using the widely accepted IAPWS-IF97 international standard.

For psychrometrics, we implemented formulae found in the 2009 ASHRAE Handbook of Fundamentals.

Among the unit operations available are thermodynamic models of

- steam turbines

- desuperheaters

- steam generators

- flash vessels

- deaerators

Brief help documents for the software in PDF format can be viewed or downloaded from here.

Note that the FienX Toolkit is among the deliverables from any modelling work done by FCL. It will only work with one of our models or with a template workbook that we can provide. Once delivered, it is free for internal use by the person or organisation specified in the add-in's About box.

Standard Psychrometric Chart (sea level)