Picture of Roda BOUNACEUR (LRGP)Within the CAPE-OPEN 2021 Annual Meeting, Dr Roda BOUNACEUR from Laboratoire Réactions et Génie des Procédés (LRGP), Nancy, France presented (PDF, 2812 Kbytes) on a new CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation.

The live recording of this presentation is available from the CAPE-OPEN Channel on YouTube.

Roda received his BSc (1993) from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques of Nancy and his PhD (2001) from the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine while collaborating with TOTAL-Exploration-Production on the kinetic modeling of the thermal evolution of crude oils in sedimentary basins. As a research engineer at LRGP, Roda is now working on kinetic and process modeling. His main objective is to determine and to develop different numerical recipes in order to solve mathematical problems occurring in process simulation.

The work presented was done in collaboration with AmsterCHEM and members of the research group PRIMO (Processes, Reactors, Intensification, Membranes, Optimization) at LRGP.

Roda begins by listing how the new CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation he is describing here belongs to a list of CAPE-OPEN Unit Operations for membrane gas separation simulation developed at LRGP. The earliest one was MEMSIC, then MEMSIC 2.0 was presented at the CAPE-OPEN 2017 Annual Meeting. Now SWEEP is the new element in this list: it features mass and energy balances, handles co and counter-current flow patterns and pressure drop is taken care of.

Roda then takes us through four case studies in which he is using each time a different process simulator in which SWEEP is plugged as a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation. The sequence is made of ProSimPlus, COFE, Aspen HYSYS and Aspen Plus. In each case Roda is comparing results obtained using SWEEP with results from the literature.

He concludes by stating that having MEMSIC and SWEEP as CAPE-OPEN Unit Operations is a real asset for engineers conducting projects involving membranes and he looks forward to develop new tools for gas-liquid and liquid-liquid separation.