Excited to announce a powerful new feature in Hydro-Calc: Cost Optimization.

Overview

With Cost Optimization, you can now instruct the solver to find the cheapest possible combination of substances that meets your nutrient requirements within a specified tolerance. Until now, the optimizer focused on minimizing the deviation from your nutrient targets (Error Minimization). This ensures proper nutrients, but now we have a way to bring the cost of those nutrients into the calcluation.

The Workflow

1. Define Costs: Ensure you have entered the cost for your substances in your Shelf.
2. Set Targets: Select your Nutrient Target as usual.
3. Review Nutrient Limits: Any limits set to min, max, between, or ignore will be treated as usual. Those set to Priority or Noraml will instead become between limits set +/- from the nutrient target based on the tolerance.
4. Optimize: Click the new Optimize Lowest Cost button (dollar sign icon) in the Mixture Editor.
5. Set Tolerance: A dialog will appear asking for the "Max Error (ppm)". This is the wiggle room you are willing to accept on limits set to Normal or Priority.
6. Result: The solver will attempt to meet your set error rate. If it can, it will solve for the lowest cost at that rate and also report back the lowest error rate it can solve for. Cost information can be found in the Cost Analysis section.
7. Iteration: Its possible you might not be able to meet a given error rate with the substances in your mixture, if the problem is infeasible you'll get a notification. If the solver reports a lower possible error rate, you can expirement by having the cost solver run at those lower rates. Generally the tighter the allowable error rate the higher the overall cost.

Getting Started

Head over to the Mixtures page, open one of your recipes, and look for the new green Dollar icon in the toolbar!

New Features

• Added cost optimization using error relaxation

Bug fixes

• Fixed issue with purity not being properly included in some calculations
• Fixed an issue on mixtures where the bar chart wouldn't load A/B values correctly
• Fix favicon loading
• Fixed Reset Nutrient Limits