Impact of Advances in Computing and Communications Technologies on Chemical Science and Technology Report of a Workshop (1999) / Chapter Skim
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5 Needs and New Directions in Computing for the Chemical Process Industries
5 Needs and New Directions in Computing for the Chemical Process Industries
Pages 62-73
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From page 62... ...
The fourth section introduces the European CAPE OPEN project, funded by Brite-Euram and nearing completion; it also discusses briefly the follow-on project, GLOBAL CAPE OPEN. The fifth section considers the closely related topic of process control, and the final section lists conclusions.
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From page 63... ...
This is happening largely because of vastly improved analytical instrumentation. In some cases we have benefited significantly from the application of computational chemistry to provide basic data that otherwise would have been too costly and time consuming to measure in the laboratory.
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From page 64... ...
The major contributors to the decline have been increased energy costs after the oil embargo, overcapacity and tougher global competition, increased costs for environmental programs, and new business ventures outside of core competencies that have been costly and unprofitable. In this setting, what are chemical companies focusing on?
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From page 65... ...
The difficulty in using commercial process simulators for process synthesis is that the equipment modules they provide require complete kinetic and thermodynamic data that are never available at this early stage of process design. In some cases one can make effective use of molecular modeling, Box 4, to help develop estimates of the missing data.
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From page 66... ...
This is generally accomplished by the use of commercial process simulators from the three major vendors, such as Aspen Plus from Aspen Tech, HYSYS from Hyprotech, and Pro II from Simulation Sciences (see Box 5~. A lot of work gets done here, and it is not unusual for about 80 percent of the effort to be spent on getting reasonably accurate kinetic and thermodynamic data.
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From page 67... ...
The power users tend to be frustrated by these imposed limitations. The major concern of the vendors is to be profitable so they need to concentrate on the largest market, which, without question, is the casual user.
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From page 68... ...
Equipment rating means that one wants to evaluate the performance of a piece of installed equipment. Taking a distillation column as an example, the user would know the number of trays, location of the feed stream, and the appropriate set of physical properties and would wish to determine the effect of changes in feed rate, reflux ratio, or reboiler heat input on column performance.
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From page 69... ...
The rest of the simulator is divided into three main sections: the unit operations, which includes reactors and other specialized pieces of processing equipment; thermodynamics and transport properties; and numerical routines of all sorts. Each unit operation will be a software component that will be able to communicate with the other major pieces of the simulator to get any services or information it needs to complete its calculations through the standard interfaces that have been developed.
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From page 70... ...
as was DuPont, so during the planning session for the reactive distillation project the question was raised about using the inheritance features of OOP to build the reactive distillation code from the azeotropic code. Two DuPont staff members, neither accomplished programmers, went to Hyprotech and, with help from Hyprotech programmers to understand the structure of the azeotropic code, they had in 2 weeks a working reactive distillation module that would run in HYSYS.
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From page 71... ...
This makes it very difficult for them, let alone industrial control practitioners, to add or try new control algorithms on any commercial DCS. If the DCS vendors adopted the component-based software development strategy of the simulation software vendors, this problem could be solved and we would get a much faster and effective transfer of advanced process control technology from the universities to industry.
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From page 72... ...
DISCUSSION Jack Pfeiffer, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: Dave, regarding your diagram on the modeling process that you said moved from left to right one of the things that we have been toying with is a recycle loop that would bring information back from plant operations into the R&D or the process synthesis step. Have you thought about the value of that, and especially have you thought about how the software that we have today, or the directions that you are proposing, may enhance that capability?
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From page 73... ...
David Smith: CAPE OPEN-compliant simulation software that is integrated as I suggested in Figure 5.2 will help because it will allow the evaluation of more process alternatives and thus increase the chances of finding process designs that will have minimal environmental impact. However, I believe the fundamental challenge is still one of chemistry.
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