Article on MATLAB Unit Operation in Aspen Plus

On August 27, 2013, the International Journal of Chemical Reaction Engineering, with Hugo DE LASA and Chunbao Charles XU as editors, published a paper by Raquel de Maria, Ismael Diaz, Manuel Rodriguez and Adrian Saiz titled “Industrial Methanol from Syngas: Kinetic Study and Process Simulation“.

From a CAPE-OPEN point of view the work published demonstrates how a unit operation model developed in Mathworks MATLAB can be embedded in a flowsheet model developed within Aspen Plus.

To do this, one needs to use several software tools developed by AmsterCHEM. First of all, the MATLAB® Unit Operation wrapper that makes a MATLAB® model appear as a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation. But such a Unit Operation works only with Material Objects implementing version 1.1 of the CAPE-OPEN Physical Properties and Thermodynamic interface specification. And Aspen Plus Material Objects implement only version 1.0 of the same interface specification. So next the MATLAB® Unit Operation is embedded into a simple COFE flowsheet, containing just that Unit Operation. Subsequently this COFE flowsheet may be plugged into Aspen Plus as a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation using the “COFE Flowsheet Unit Operation”.

Quite neat!