A CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation Software Component for Solving Chemkin Reactor Networks Inside Process Modeling Simulations

At the AIChE 2012 Annual Meeting, within the session “CAPE-OPEN Standard – Design, Implementation and Use” sponsored by the Computing And Systems Technology (CAST) of AIChE, Tony GARRATT, Software Development Manager at Reaction Design, presented (PDF, 1050 Kbytes) on a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation software component that enables CHEMKIN Reactor Networks to be used in CAPE-OPEN Simulator Environments, such as Aspen Plus.

Networks consist of clusters of perfectly stirred reactors and/or plug-flow reactors and are solved in a sequential-modular fashion, with tearing for re-cycle connections between clusters.

Since the CAPE-OPEN component is based on the industry leading CHEMKIN technology, this enables much more detailed kinetics and reactor models to be used within the simulation of flowsheets of process modeling applications. This provides much more accurate predictions of the products of the reactions than would be otherwise possible for process modeling via highly accurate detailed mechanisms that have been created within the combustion industry over many years of research and validated against experimental data.Tony presents the results of applying this component to the modeling of a goal gasification process, where we solve a reduced order model of a computational fluid dynamics model inside Aspen Plus.