CAPE-OPEN UPDATE, Volume 10

CAPE-OPEN UPDATE is a publication of the CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN), a non-profit consortium for the development of the CAPE-OPEN standard.

Based in Pakistan, SHMA provides management consulting and software development services in a number of areas, including but not limited to Customized Software Development, Off-the-Shelf Software Solutions, ERP Implementation Services, Offshore Software Development Outsourcing, Financial Consulting, Actuarial Consulting and HR Consulting. SHMA provides software development services to BP which also includes development and maintenance of "BP Process Engineers Toolkit" and some of its component applications. This software is being used across BP by its process engineers. More recently, SHMA was also involved in development of prototype version of CO-Logger application for CO-LAN. For any further information, you may contact Mr. Anjum Raheel at anjum.raheel@sidathyder.com.pk

The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is a science, technology, and energy laboratory owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As part of DOE’s national laboratory system, NETL supports DOE’s mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States. Using unique capabilities in energy system dynamics, geological and environmental systems, and computational and basic sciences, NETL conducts cutting-edge Fossil Energy (FE) research and technology development on site. We also apply extensive technology-and project-management capabilities to shape, fund, and manage research in 47 states and more than 40 foreign countries. Our portfolio of onsite and contracted research includes more than 1,400 projects, with a total award value of nearly $8 billion and private sector cost-sharing of almost $4 billion. NETL has nearly 60 acoranda of understanding with industry, universities, and other national laboratories. NETL has sites in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Morgantown, West Virginia; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Fairbanks, Alaska. More than 1,100 employees work at NETL’s four sites.

The DOE is investing heavily in FE R&D programs to promote the development of advanced power generation systems that meet U.S. energy needs while maximizing efficiency and minimizing environmental impact and cost. In order to achieve the aggressive performance goals for high-efficiency, zero-emission power plants such as DOE’s gasification-based FutureGen plant, it is necessary to extend NETL’s systems analysis capabilities to exploit the use of high-fidelity equipment models in co-simulations coupled with advanced visualization and high-performance computing.

At NETL, computational scientists and engineers, building on strong collaborations with R&D technology partners, are developing the Advanced Process Engineering Co-Simulator (APECS) as an integration framework that combines steady-state process simulation with high-fidelity equipment models, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, custom engineering models, and faster reduced-order models (ROMs) based on previously computed CFD results. NETL system analysts are evaluating and optimizing potential FutureGen plant configurations using APECS co-simulation technology to run Aspen Plus ® process simulations coupled with detailed FLUENT® CFD simulations of key equipment items, such as gasifiers, combustors, gas turbines, heat recovery steam generators, membrane separators, and fuel cells.

The APECS system achieves plug-and-play interoperability by using the process industry-standard CAPE-OPEN (CO) interfaces for unit operations, physical properties, and reaction kinetics. To facilitate the efficient preparation of equipment models as CO-compliant models for use in APECS, two configuration wizards are provided, one for FLUENT and one for custom equipment models, ROMs, and other CFD codes. The methods of the CO unit operation interfaces enable the seamless use of equipment models in the process simulator and facilitate the bi-directional exchange of stream information. For CFD models, the multi-dimensional boundary conditions are mapped automatically to process streams and vice versa. The CO physical property interface is used to transfer constant or temperature-dependent physical properties from the process simulator to the equipment models. Similarly, the CO reaction kinetics interface facilitates the automatic transfer of reaction stoichiometry and power-law parameters from the process simulator to the equipment models. The CAPE-OPEN COM/CORBA bridge implementation in APECS allows process models running under the Windows operating system to use equipment models running locally/remotely and serially/in parallel under a different operating system such as Linux.

Winner of an R&D 100 Award in 2004, the powerful APECS co-simulation technology, for the first time, provides the necessary level of detail and accuracy essential for engineers to better understand and optimize the fluid flow, heat and mass transfer, and chemical reactions that drive overall plant performance. Such capabilities will speed technology development by reducing pilot/demo-scale facility design time and operating campaigns, thereby lowering the cost and technical risk in realizing high efficiency, zero-emission power plants.

NETL (www.netl.doe.gov) is an Associate Member of the CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN) and hosted the 2nd Annual U.S. CAPE-OPEN Meeting in Morgantown, WV on May 25-26, 2005 . For more information on NETL’s APECS technology and use of the CAPE-OPEN standard, please contact Dr. Stephen E. Zitney, Research Group Leader, Device-Scale & Systems Modeling, at stephen.zitney@netl.doe.gov.  

Chemstations is a leading global supplier of process simulation software for the following process industries: Oil & Gas, Petrochemicals, Chemicals, and Fine Chemicals, including Pharmaceuticals. We currently offer several individually licensed, and tightly integrated software packages to address the needs of the chemical engineer, whether doing new process design or working in the plant.  Chemstations is the home of CHEMCAD (Chemical Process Simulation) and SPEAD (Molecular Simulation & Dynamics).  Please visit http://www.chemstations.net for more information. For more information, contact peterm@chemstations.net or yiminp@chemstations.net

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