Crate stages_thermo 

stages-thermo — a staged-separation (distillation) column solver

stages-thermo is a learning library and a fast steady-state column engine for staged separations. It walks the full pedagogical ladder — McCabe–Thiele → Ponchon–Savarit → Fenske–Underwood–Gilliland shortcut → rigorous MESH (Wang–Henke, Burningham–Otto, Naphtali–Sandholm) — with every method implemented from scratch and anchored to its textbook equations, and it exposes a granular, batch-capable API (“numpy for distillation columns”).

The thermodynamics — K-values, enthalpies, and their derivatives — come entirely from vle_thermo. This crate adds no thermodynamics of its own; it is the first downstream consumer of vle-thermo. See PLAN.md §1 for the full vision.

Status

Milestone 1 (column model + McCabe–Thiele). Implemented so far:

• thermo — the adapter over vle-thermo 0.9.x: thermo::ThermoSystem with database-loaded components, φ-φ (Peng–Robinson) and γ-φ (van Laar) routes, bubble-point evaluation.
• [column] — the binary-sufficient column model (column::BinaryColumn, column::Feed, column::CondenserKind).
• binary — the equilibrium curve (binary::EquilibriumCurve) and the full McCabe–Thiele construction ([binary::mccabe_thiele]): operating lines, q-line, stage stepping, R_min with tangent-pinch detection, total reflux (N_min), N(R), Murphree efficiency.

The remaining method modules (shortcut, rigorous, numerics) land milestone by milestone per ROADMAP.md; the target module tree is documented in PLAN.md §6.

Design rule (PLAN §7)

Exactly one module talks to vle-thermo: thermo. Everything else consumes it through a provider interface, so a surrogate thermo model (the inside-out inner loop, a stretch milestone) or a test mock can slot in without touching the solvers.

Modules

binary

Binary (two-component) staged-separation methods — rungs 1–2 of the pedagogical ladder (PLAN §4).

column

The column domain model — the objects every method shares.

thermo

The thermodynamics adapter — the only module that imports vle_thermo (PLAN §7).

types

Core error and report types shared across the crate.

Functions

version

Return this crate’s version string (matches Cargo.toml).