Mathematica 13.2 Breaks Unit Handling in Mathematica Wrapper

henningjp commented 1 year ago

Description

Mathematica 13.2 breaks some unit handling employed in the RefpropLink paclet; Specifically the definition of Newton (N) and Ferenheit (°F) in the underlying RefpropUnits code.

Steps to Reproduce

Just load the RefpropLink wrapper per usual with
```
Needs["RefpropLink`"]
```

Expected behavior: No errors on load and accurate behavior of pre-defined units.

Actual behavior:

Loading RefpropLink throws an error, at which point there is confusion between N, Newton, and Newtons.
```
Quantity: Unable to interpret unit specification 1. N .
```
Applying pre-defined unit, °F, results in non-sensical unit conversion
```
In[1] T = 72 °F
Out[1] 18426.8 K
```

These are the only issues discovered so far. Basic REFPROP wrapper functionality is still working.

Versions

REFPROP Version: REFPROP 10
Operating System and Version: Windows 10 Access Method: Mathematica Wrapper (Mathematica 13.2 - Recent Update)

Additional Information

Working on fixing this.
Suggest not upgrading to 13.2 just yet until a patch is created.

Suspect some duplicate symbol definitions are now bleeding over to create conflicts with unit symbols initialized when RefpropLink is loaded.

The symbol "N" has always been a built-in numeric evaluation function, but now seems to be causing a conflict with definition of "Newton". This wasn't a problem before, but there's a simple fix for this.
This one may be more problematic as the application of the affine unit, °F, seems to have changed in 13.2. May need another way to represent this unit easily or limit users to native Quantity definitions for "DegreesFerenheit" or absolute units. Additionally, K is now a pre-defined symbol in 13.2 (it wasn't before), which may be causing a conflict.
Further investigation shows that this second issue may be a bug in Mathematica 13.2. As of version 13.2, Temperature units now come in two types, Absolute and Difference. For example, Rankine units are represented as "DegreesRankine" (Absolute) and "DegreesRankineDifference" (difference unit). However, some straight-forward unit conversions (without RepropLink loaded) show that when converting to/from affine temperature units of °F and °C, "DegreesRankine" is being treated as a difference unit and not an absolute units. This may be creating all kinds of repercussions. Currently investigating this issue with Wolfram.

ianhbell commented 1 year ago

Would this break backwards compatibility for earlier version of Mathematica?

henningjp commented 1 year ago

No. I can fix the first issue for all versions and have already tested it using a more rigorous unit definition.

The second issue may fix itself if it’s really a Wolfram bug. If not, a workaround can be made to be version dependent in the paclet code; provided I can find a workaround.

ianhbell commented 1 year ago

Did you report the possible bug?

henningjp commented 1 year ago

Checked version 3.1 at work this week to verify. Works fine. Reporting 13.2 issue with examples this Friday to Wolfram.

henningjp commented 1 year ago

Wolfram is aware and working on it. In the meantime, they've provided a work-around. I'll issue a patch update this week once I've tested it with the workaround applied only if MM version 13.2 is detected by the paclet scripts.

usnistgov / REFPROP-wrappers