Chemical Process Design

This is the support page for material related to Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE). We provide support info on Aspen Plus and PRO/II. These are the two steady-state process simulators with the largest market shares. Aspen Technologies and Simsci-Esscor (formerly Simulation Sciences) arguably are also the two most dominant software vendor in process simulation. They support a "full line" of products that other smaller companies do not and cannot do. Check their Web sites (listed below) to see what they have.

Here are two quick reminders regarding process simulations:
1. Avoid pitfalls
2. A word on the concept of "design"

Here are the Web sites of the major companies in the process simulation software business:

• Aspen Technology
  • Hyprotech/HYSIS (Bought by AEA Technology in 1997. Sold again to AspenTech in 2002. And AEA sold its remaining fluids simulation business to ANSYS.)
• Simsci-Esscor (formerly Simulation Sciences and Esscor; both bought by Invensys in the late 1990s)
• WinSim/DESIGN II (was ChemShare till 1995)
• Chemstations/ChemCAD

The CAPE-OPEN Standard:

• COCO (CAPE-OPEN to CAPE-OPEN) Simulution Environment
  -- with COFE and TEA, etc., etc. (see also their download page)
  • amsterCHEM.com -- They put COCO together; see also their publication list on the "about us" page;
    and a PDF on the Jim Douglas HDA case study on the "links" page;
    the HDA input file comes with the COCO installation
  • Slides from a 2006 presentation by Jasper van Baten [Cached PDF]
  • Flowsheeting for free with COCO by van Baten et al. in the winter 2007 issue of CEE [Cached PDF]
  • CO Scheme by Michel Pons at the 2005 European CAPE Symposium [Cached PDF]
  • Slides used by Michel Pons [Cached PDF]
• CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN) - with links to commercial CO compliant tools
  • Articles by Michel Pons posted on chemicalprocessing.com, for as long as they keep them live
    - What is CO-LaN?
    - CO activities
    
• ChemSep -- ChemSep-LITE is free. Recommendation is to install COCO during which process
  will also install ChemSepLite. COCO uses it to do flash and column computations.

Simulation Case Study:
A case study from (formerly) Simulation Sciences on a vinyl chloride monomer plant (in PDF). FYI: This is what we used to do in 124A--design and "build" the plant section by section over the quarter as a prelude to the AIChE Contest Problem. The convergence of the entire plant is almost impossible unless we have a good ideal on the probable solution from preliminary section by section results. We have done this with both Aspen Plus and PRO/II.