How To Activate BurnSim

Free educational licenses are issued automatically to students and staff at recognized schools and universities. No purchase is required.

Activating BurnSim

Once you have purchased a license, you can activate your BurnSim installation. A connection to the internet is required for the activation process. If the machine you want to run BurnSim on has no network connection, you can activate it yourself from a second computer or a phone - see offline activation below.

1. Open BurnSim and then select the menu item 'Help', then 'Activate BurnSim'.
2. The activation dialog will open. Read and follow the instructions in that window, providing your email address, and leaving the CD Key field blank if you don't have one.
3. You will receive an email to validate your email address. Click the link in that email to verify your address is valid.
4. Again in BurnSim click Help > Activate and your activation will be complete.

You will have to repeat the process of activation for each machine you install BurnSim on, or if you reinstall the operating system. A personal or commercial license covers one named user on up to five computers at a time; an educational license covers up to three. Once a paid license is activated, that computer does not need an internet connection again.

Free trial

If you have not bought a license yet, BurnSim can issue you a free 5-day trial so you can evaluate it on a real design. The trial runs every feature, with no limit on how many simulations you run.

What a trial cannot do is produce output you keep: saving motor files, exporting CSV or .eng, printing, and batch mode all need a purchased license. Everything else - grain design, the propellant database, thermochemistry, erosive burning, test-data import, the 3‑D view - works normally.

1. Install and open BurnSim. You are offered a trial when it starts; you can also reach it at any time from Help > Activate BurnSim, on the Free trial tab.
2. Enter your email address and request the trial.
3. You will receive an email to validate your address. Click the link in it.
4. Back in BurnSim, the trial becomes active and the title bar shows how long is left.

A trial lasts 5 days from the time it is issued, and covers two machines - enough for a laptop and a desktop. The second machine shares the same trial and the same expiry date; it does not start a fresh 5 days. A trial is issued once per machine.

Trials require BurnSim 4.0.0.23 or later. Earlier versions do not understand the trial license type and the server will not issue one to them, so update first if you are running something older.

When you buy a license, activate it the normal way described above - there is nothing to cancel and no need to wait for the trial to run out. Your purchase replaces the trial immediately, and the restrictions lift as soon as BurnSim is restarted.

Educational licenses

BurnSim is free for educational use. If you activate with an email address at a recognized school or university, a free educational license is created for you automatically - there is nothing to buy and nothing to apply for.

This is not limited to .edu addresses, and it is not limited to the United States. The approved list covers universities and schools around the world - among others, addresses ending in .ac.uk, .ac.in, .edu.br, .edu.au, .edu.pk and many individual institutions in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa and Canada.

If you are at a school or university and activation does not issue you an educational license automatically, your institution's domain is most likely just not on the list yet. Contact us from your institutional address and we will look at adding it. This is routine and we are glad to do it.

Educational licenses are issued for one year at a time and renew automatically the next time BurnSim activates against the license server, so a machine using an educational license needs to reach the internet occasionally - roughly once a year - to keep running. Paid licenses do not expire this way.

Usage reporting on educational licenses

Educational licenses are given away, and supporting them is not free. In exchange, an installation running under an educational license reports how BurnSim is being used, so that the effort that goes into it is directed by what people actually do with it. That is the whole of what the reporting is for.

This is not only a statement on a web page. It is clauses 36 to 39 of the license agreement BurnSim shows you on first run and asks you to accept — clause 38 sets out the exchange for an educational license, and clause 39 commits us to collecting nothing from any other kind. What follows is a plain-language summary of those clauses, and they are the terms that bind us.

It sends counts and categories only: how many simulations were run and how long they took, which grain types and program features were used, how many grains a motor had as a range, your units preference, categories of error, and version numbers. So that reports can be counted per installation, it also carries the installation ID and machine fingerprint already held for your license.

It contains nothing that describes your work. No motor files, no grain dimensions, no propellant names, formulations or coefficients, no notes, no file names, no free text of any kind, and no keystroke or mouse activity. Your designs and your data are your intellectual property - frequently unpublished research - and they never leave your computer. For a class, that also means no student names, no coursework and no grades. That is clause 37, and the full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Personal and commercial licenses, and unlicensed evaluation use, send no usage data at all. That is clause 39, which also commits us to separate notice and consent before collecting anything beyond what clause 38 covers.

If your institution cannot permit the reporting, tell us and we will work out a paid license without it rather than leave you unable to use BurnSim. Clause 38 says that plainly too, and it is the route to take if reporting is a problem for you: the same clause lets us decline to renew an educational license that has never sent a report, and we would far rather move you to a license that fits than have a renewal fail a year from now.

License eligibility and export control

This applies to every kind of license — evaluation, personal, educational and commercial. BurnSim is US-origin software and is subject to United States export-control and sanctions law.

Licenses are issued at our discretion. We may decline to issue, decline to renew, or withdraw a license — including one that has been paid for — where we believe that supplying it could present export-control, sanctions or restricted-party risk. That can include organizations with a defense or weapons-development role, and destinations subject to United States sanctions. If we decline a purchase on these grounds we will refund it, unless we are prohibited by law from doing so. This is clause 19 of the license agreement, which you accept when you activate.

This affects very few people, and it is not a judgement about you or your work. If a license is declined or withdrawn and you think that is a mistake, write to us — say who you are and what you are working on, and we will look at it again. We have reversed these decisions before.

Machines with no internet connection

If the computer you want to run BurnSim on has no network connection at all, you can still activate it yourself — and you no longer have to email us and wait for a reply. You need any second computer or a phone with internet access. Offline activation is available for personal and commercial licenses only.

1. On the offline computer, open Help → Activate BurnSim and choose the Offline tab. Enter the email address your license is registered to, click Create Request, and copy the code it produces or save it to a USB stick.
2. On a computer or phone with internet, go to licensing.burnsim.com/offline-activation and paste that code in.
3. We email a link to the address your license is registered to. Open it and it gives you your activation code.
4. Take that code back to the offline computer, paste it into the same Offline tab and click Import. That completes activation, and the machine never needs to connect again.

If the page can't help — the registered address has changed, the license has used all its installs, or anything else — contact us and we will sort it out by hand as before.

An educational license is not suitable for a permanently offline machine. There are two reasons. The first activation has to reach the license server, because that is what creates the license. And because educational licenses run a year at a time and renew on activation, the machine has to reach the server again periodically for the license to stay valid. If you need BurnSim on a machine that will never be connected, you need a paid license - personal or commercial - which, once activated, keeps working offline indefinitely.

Freeing up an install

Your license allows a set number of computers to be activated at one time. This is not a limit on how many times you may install BurnSim over the life of your license - it is a limit on how many computers hold an active install at once. If you replace a computer, rebuild one, or reinstall the operating system, the old activation is still counted until you release it.

You can do this yourself, without waiting on us:

1. Go to licensing.burnsim.com/installs.php and enter the email address your license was issued to. (BurnSim also links to this page directly if an activation fails because the limit has been reached.)
2. If that address has active installs, you will be emailed a link. The link is good for a limited time and can be used once, so open it when you are ready to make the changes.
3. The page shows how many installs you have used and how many are available, and lists each active install with its computer name, when it was activated, when it was last seen, and which version of BurnSim it was running - enough to recognize the machine you no longer use.
4. Tick the ones you want to release, choose a reason, and release them together. Those slots are then free for a new activation right away.

Releasing is meant for computers you have genuinely stopped using, so there are limits on how often it can be done and very recent activations cannot be released immediately. If you are moving between machines more often than that allows, or you need more installs than your license covers, please contact us - we would rather sort it out than have you stuck.