Many people have developed unit operations models in Microsoft Excel or in various software packages for numerical computations. But to make use of these models within a process simulator was difficult if not impossible.

AmsterCHEM (developer of COCO: COFE, TEA, CORK, CORN, etc...) has recently released tools that let one use a Microsoft Excel or a Scilab unit operation model as a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation, so giving the opportunity to plug and use such a model in a CAPE-OPEN compliant process simulator. You may find those tools in the download section of www.amsterchem.com. Since these tools adhere to the Thermodynamic and Physical Properties interface specification in its version 1.1, only a small number of process modeling environments are able to work with these tools: COFE, ProSimPlus or SolidSim are compliant with version 1.1 for Unit Operations. But major software vendors may join this list in the months to come.

You may want to give it a try. This development participates in a general trend. A number of other modeling tools, COMSOL, DYMOLA, gPROMS, Open Modelica, MoT, Matlab, are showing or will be showing CAPE-OPEN compatibility in order to bring advanced modeling closer to process simulation.