At Ex Mente, we are our teams. Our Digital Team consists of a focused group of computer and electronic engineers dedicated to researching and developing high-performance tools. These tools include simulators, calculators, and process modelling applications. Through the Technology at your fingertips series, we want to showcase some of the work that our Digital Team is currently doing. In our first article, From rust to iron, we explored the technical decisions that form the foundation of our Digital Team’s work, turning Rust into iron. In this second article, From iron to steel, we explore how our Digital Team refine this iron into steel.

Removing the friction
The goal of our Digital Team is to move our other engineers away from the friction of manual hand calculations, fragile spreadsheets, and isolated software packages towards automated, verified, and accessible Python libraries. Our Digital Team builds the bridge between raw computational power and everyday usability.

An alloy of efficiency: ChemApp in Python
One example of where our Digital Team supports the rest of Ex Mente is how they approach thermodynamic calculations. By wrapping ChemApp calculations in a custom Python interface, they transform the rest of our experts’ workflow. Our experts do not just run calculations; they orchestrate them. This transition allows our experts to:

• Automate the tedious: Loop through thousands of iterations automatically rather than manually entering data points.
• Handle scale: Feed large, real-world datasets into the model seamlessly.
• Analyze instantly: Use Python’s ecosystem to perform complex mathematical post-processing on the results immediately.

Verified tools lead to efficiency
The Digital Team provides the rest of our experts with tools that are tested and verified. This helps us to be more efficient so that we can focus on providing value to our clients. By relying on version-controlled libraries, we can confidently focus on solving clients’ problems faster, and more accurately.

What is next?
In the last article in our series, we will discuss how the Digital Team takes these refined solutions and scale them into the robust applications that we deliver to our clients.