DWSIM is a chemical process simulator that has been under development since 2006 by Daniel Wagner Oliveira de Medeiros. Currently it offers a set of tools that allow the creation of a wide variety of simulation models for industrial processes. DWSIM shows two main advantages, fi rstly it is an open source software with GPL v3 license (General Public License version 3) so it offers users rights for its using, studying, modifying and distribution for any purpose. Secondly, it is compliant with the CAPE-OPEN interface standards, a freely available set of standards that allow the communication between chemical engineering software components.
In this work it is shown how, taking into account these important features for DWSIM, it was possible to model, in a highly fl exible environment, cases for distillation in real operational scenarios. Especi ally, DWSIM was used as the process modelling environment (PME) where some changes were made to the source code in order to improve the convergence of the column solver for specifi c cases. On the other hand, all the responsabilities related to the equilibrium and property calculations rely on the thermodynamic component TEA (Thermodynamic for Engineering Applications) that communicates with DWSIM through the CAPE OPEN standards.
During the model validation step it was considered cases from literature that involve different con gurations for a distillation column, while as case studies results are shown for two multicomponent columns, one of them a depropanizer column from the separation plant of a Fluid Catalityc Cracking Unit, and the other a benzene recuperation column from an aromatic plant. In both cases results were in very good agreement with operational data.