QuickStart

Install RocketCEA

The easiest way to install RocketCEA is:

pip install rocketcea

    OR on Linux
sudo pip install rocketcea
    OR perhaps
pip install --user rocketcea

Getting Help

After installing with pip, there will be a launch command line program called rocketcea or, on Windows, rocketcea.exe.

From a terminal or command prompt window simply type:

rocketcea

Your browser will launch with these RocketCEA help pages.

Running RocketCEA

Any use of RocketCEA begins with an import statement and an instance of CEA_obj:

from rocketcea.cea_obj import CEA_Obj
C = CEA_Obj( oxName='LOX', fuelName='LH2')

In the above example, LOX and LH2 are called out, but any propellants on the Propellants page can be used.

There are a large number of examples included in this document

For instance, look at LOX/LH2 Performance on the Standard Examples page.

Highlight the source code with your mouse, right click the highlighted code and select Copy.

Paste that code into your text editor and save it to a python file.(for example D:/rocketcea/example_1.py).

At a command prompt, navigate to that subdirectory (D:/rocketcea in the example above) and give the command:

python.exe example1.py

In many text editors, hitting the F5 key will execute the code.

Install Problems

RocketCEA makes heavy use of the NASA CEA FORTRAN code. For RocketCEA, the NASA FORTRAN code has been modified and turned into a python module using f2py.

When compiling FORTRAN into a python library, each version of python needs its own compiled library. The libraries I've provided are:

Windows python 2.7 32 bit and 64 bit
Windows python 3.5 32 bit and 64 bit
Windows python 3.6 32 bit and 64 bit
Windows python 3.7 32 bit and 64 bit

Ubuntu Linux python 2.7 32 bit and 64 bit
Ubuntu Linux python 3.5 32 bit and 64 bit
Ubuntu Linux python 3.6 32 bit and 64 bit

If your version of python is not shown above, or if RocketCEA fails to load the py_cea module, you may need to run f2py on the FORTRAN code on your system in order to create py_cea.pyd or py_cea.so or some variation thereof.

The source code py_cea.f is in the install directory of rocketcea along with a FORTRAN include file called py_cea.inc.

Windows Issues

Commands like:

pip install rocketcea
pip3.6 install rocketcea

should just work on Windows.

So far, the main issue I've had on a Windows platform is when python is installed in a directory with a space in the name. Any directories like C:/Python27 or C:/Python37 should work fine.

Another issue is with python 3.7 64 bit. At the time of this writing, matplotlib was not properly installing. I made matplotlib a dependency of RocketCEA and I assume that python 3.7 will have working support for matplotlib soon.

Ubuntu Linux Issues

Commands like:

pip install rocketcea
pip3 install rocketcea

may well fail with any number of messages.

The most common problems can be solved by first installing dependencies like the following.:

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib
sudo apt-get install python-tkinter

OR

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-matplotlib
sudo apt-get install python3-tkinter

AND PERHAPS

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
sudo apt-get install pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libgfortran3:i386
sudo pip install cairocffi
sudo apt-get install python-gi-cairo