Consortium Workshop Highlights TRC Advances

Our 2018 NIST/TRC Consortium Workshop has drawn to a close; the consortium is hosted by the Thermodynamics Research Center within Boulder’s Applied Chemicals and Materials Division.  The annual working meeting with our primary industrial partners gives a wonderful opportunity to collect user feedback about both how well TRC outputs serve our stakeholders, in terms of development efforts and as a consistency check on our research directions.  In attendance were external partners from AVEVA (a subsidiary of Schneider Electric), VMG (a Schlumberger company), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and AspenTech.

In addition to reporting the continued smooth operation of NIST data collection efforts and work around the flagship database, ThermoData Engine (SRD 103), NIST presented a number of novel advances in data, informatics, and modeling that were accomplished during the last year.  Among the more general document tracking and workflow issues, Consortium members learned more about TRC’s efforts to comprehensively index several common reference sources.  From the perspective of advances in chemical science, NIST demonstrated new techniques for computing experimental-quality enthalpies of formation from first principles in only hours.  These efforts all align with TRC’s priority in being able to respond quickly to the data needs of our partners.