FreeEOS is a software library for calculating an equation of state for conditions in stellar interiors. The latest stable version of this library source code, FreeEOS-2.1.0, has been released on 2007-06-17. The principal change for this release is the new CMake-based build system. (You use the "cmake" command rather than the "configure" command and follow that "cmake" command with the usual "make" and "make install". See the README file for details about how to use this new build system.)

One API difference for this release is the parameters qf and qp of free_eos have been disabled (always return 1.d300) to remind users that those parameters should be ignored. Historically, those parameters were used to help calculate an approximate gravitational energy generation rate, but the exact formula for that rate is given by the preferred eq. 10a of Faulkner, Robertson, and Faulkner, 1970 which expresses the rate in terms of the pressure, density, and internal energy that are already returned by free_eos.

The other API difference is that if the iteration_count parameter of free_eos returns a negative value, that means there was some convergence difficulty in the EOS calculation. This change should make it easier to explore the boundaries of where FreeEOS can be calculated, and users are now strongly advised to check for negative iteration counts since free_eos will no longer stop when there is a convergence problem.

There were no fortran source code changes between 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 other than to support the above two API changes so you should expect no differences in results between FreeEOS-2.0.0 and FreeEOS-2.1.0. Nevertheless, I advise you update to 2.1.0 since that is the only version I support (CMake makes my life much easier as a developer), and version 2.1.0 will be used as a benchmark for more interesting FreeEOS changes that are in the works.

Download the FreeEOS-2.1.0 tarball from here and have a look at the release notes and ChangeLog here.

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Copyright © 2007 Alan W. Irwin

Webmaster for FreeEOS

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