Nov 30, 2016 ByJoey Bernard
in Education HOWTOs Science
In past articles, I've looked at several libraries or specialist applications that can be used to model some physical process or another. Sometimes though you want to be able to model several different processes at the same time and in an interactive mode. This is especially helpful in educational situations where you are trying to learn how those processes work. So in this article, I introduce an application named Step from the Edu section of the KDE Project .
The one major limitation is that the simulation runs only in two dimensions. Aside from that, you can model almost any system you can imagine. You can create discrete systems that are made of particles connected either with rigid rods or springs. You can apply external gravitational or electrical forces to your system. There is a molecular dynamics portion that allows you to model gases and liquids, including condensation and evaporation, and there is support for units and error values in your numbers. Several solvers are available to handle the actual calculations, so you should be able to find one that is best for your particular application.
To install Step, you should have a package available within your distribution's package management system. For example, with Debian-based distributions, you can install Step with this command:
sudo apt-get install stepOne thing to be aware of is that Step is part of the KDE Project. So, if you install it on a different desktop environment, such as GNOME or Unity, you also will need to install a large number of KDE support libraries. It will run fine on other desktop environments, so you don't actually need to run KDE.
To start Step, you either can find it within your desktop's menu system or open a terminal window and run the step command. When it starts up, you'll get a new, empty project in which to build your simulation.
Figure 1. When you start Step, you get a new blank project to start your simulation.
In the center of your window is the main pane where your system of particles and forces is displayed. On the left-hand side is a palette of elements you can use to build the system you want to model. On the right-hand side, you can see a series of panes that give information about the system as a whole, along with details about specific selected elements.
It might be rather daunting to look at all of this functionality and have to start with a completely blank canvas. Luckily, Step comes with a number of tutorials to walk you through the first steps of building and simulating systems within Step. You can access them by clicking the menu item File→Open Tutorial. This pops up a dialog window where you can select and load one of the five provided tutorials. When you select one, you get a system of elements along with a description of activities that you can follow along with to help you learn a bit more about each of Step's sections.
Figure 2. Step comes with a set of tutorials to walk you through some of the available functionality.
1 2 next lastJoey Bernard has a background in both physics and computer science. This serves him well in his day job as a computational research consultant at the University of New Brunswick. He also teaches computational physics and parallel programming.