Cover page of Education For Chemical EngineersLogo of Universidade Sao PauloThree members of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Universidade de São Paulo have published on line today a paper in Education For Chemical Engineers. The paper discusses the contents of a course given to undergraduates of this university in “Advanced Programming for Chemical Process”. The course was created in 2015 and its structure and contents have been evaluated by the academics and the students.

Within the course, it is worth mentioning that an introduction to CAPE-OPEN is given within the course of 60 hours but no implementation of CAPE-OPEN is performed by the students. Same when using EMSO, a software tool that complies with CAPE-OPEN and which is used as a modeller.

Use of CAPE-OPEN in teaching chemical engineering has occurred previously, especially at University of Cape Town as presented at the CAPE-OPEN 2018 Annual Meeting. Still there also, software programming where CAPE-OPEN is implemented was not conducted.

On the other hand, an experience with developing code implementing CAPE-OPEN has been made during a summer school at Lamar University and reported upon at a CAPE-OPEN US Conference. An even earlier experience was conducted at ENSIACET in France.

It is worth mentioning also the initiative taken by University of Trieste to develop a Wizard for CAPE-OPEN Unit Operations in .NET with the objective to make it easier for students to program with CAPE-OPEN in mind. In the paper from University of São Paulo, students are stating that they would like the C# part of the course to be extended. Relying on the Wizard from University of Trieste could be of some help to introduce CAPE-OPEN in a practical way to the students.

Along with the CAPE-OPEN Annual Meetings, one-day training courses have been given by CO-LaN quite a few times, where trainees were given the task to develop software implementing CAPE-OPEN. While always a challenge for the trainees, the experience has been seen as excellent by them. See the latest report on the training course given in October 2018.