hvlbuzz 2023.5

Compute surface gradient of overhead power lines / prediction of audible noise and electromagnetic field at ground

HVLBuzz

Actual docs 📖 can be found here.

HVLBuzz is a simulation tool to calculate the surface gradient of overhead power lines and predict the audible noise and electromagnetic field at ground. It was designed as a Student Thesis of Aldo Tobler, supervised by Soren Hedtke and Christian Franck from the High Voltage Lab (HVL), D-ITET, ETH.

This tool is completely free to use as is and only requires freely available Python libraries to run. The GUI is based on the Kivy framework, while the mathematical computations and plot generation rely the widely used NumPy and Matplotlib.

Installation

It is recommended that you use a Python virtual envioronement to run HVLBuzz. Run the following command to create folder called kivy_venv inside which your environement will live. The latest version of Python this code has been tested with was 3.11

python -m virtualenv kivy_venv

Activate your virtual environement by running

kivy_venv\Scripts\activate.bat # 🪟
. kivy_venv/bin/activate # 🐧 / 🍏

Then install hvlbuzz into your environement as follows

pip install .

This will also install an executable python script in your environments bin folder.

Usage

To run the binary obtained in the install part, run

hvlbuzz

Alternatively, the module is can also be started from python:

python -m hvlbuzz

or

python hvlbuzz

Packaged version

The current version (for 64-bit Windows) can be found here.

In order to run properly, the buzz.exe executalbe needs to be able to have recursive read and write access to the folder it finds itself in; in particualr to the file buzz.ini as well as for the subfolder called temp in which temporary files are created when the Export PDF function of the application is used.

Compiling your own packaged version

The source code can also be compiled by yourself using PyInstaller using the provided hvlbuzz/buzz.spec file.

pyinstaller hvlbuzz/buzz.spec

A buzz.exe binary will be available in a (newly created if non-existing) dist\buzz folder.