On October 5, 2016, during the CAPE-OPEN 2016 Annual Meeting, Sergej BLAGOV (BASF), as co-leader with Jasper van BATEN (AmsterCHEM) of the Thermo SIG, delivered a report (PDF, 541 Kbytes) on activities conducted by the SIG over the period spanning from October 2015 till end of September 2016.

After restating the key responsabilities given to the Thermo SIG by CO-LaN Management Board, S. BLAGOV explained that the SIG activities have been conducted mostly by a core group gathering himself plus Jasper van BATEN and Mark STIJNMAN (Shell Global Solutions) with help from Michel PONS (CO-LaN’s CTO). The representatives of other CO-LaN Members involved in the SIG have not been involved in the activities described hereafter.

Still the Thermo SIG is happy to welcome a new member of the core group: Bjørn MARIBO-MOGENSEN (Hafnium Labs), previously at CERE and the at Linde, bringing his experience in electrolytes and CAPE-OPEN implementation.

During the period covered by this report, Mark STIJNMAN joined the core group and began by reviewing extensively the document describing the Reaction Package interface specification. It is this document that the core group is still working on while the main concepts have been presented at the CAPE-OPEN 2012 Annual Meeting.

If the textual requirements are finalized and classified per package, and the Use Cases are finalized as well (29 are present in the document nowadays), the description of each interface method is not finalized and the formalization of the interface in IDL is not done. Thermo SIG requested reviews from the CO-LaN membership on the document in order to check its completeness from a conceptual point of view and is consistency. As mentioned above, M. STIJNMAN contributed his review and raised fundamental questions on the structure of the document as well as on the interface design, such as an overly complicated hierachy of reactions, too slack implementation rules, business cases unclear.

As immediate goals, Thermo SIG set up to define business cases as well as to re-structure the document. This document uses three main concepts: a Reaction Server than exposes Reactions, a Chemical Phase Equilibrium Server, multiple Compound Slates.The initial structure of the document carried all three concepts almost simultaneously while it is felt now, owing to the extensive description each concept needs and how they can be separated, that the CAPE-OPEN template should be applied per concept. In order to achieve these goals, the Thermo SIG is now formulating the theoretical background with consistent terms needed to formulate business cases, and for the remaining of the document as well. The purpose of this section is not to write a textbook on reaction engneering but to make the reader understand how the interface design fits with the commonly used modelling approaches for reactive systems. This is work under progress.

S. BLAGOV called for more input from other CO-LaN Members and reminded everyone that the developed document is available to all Members.