With the help of BASF who facilitated the choice of the venue and many of the arrangements, CO-LaN organized the CAPE-OPEN 2014 Annual Meeting on September 9-11, 2014 in Mörfelden, Germany.
On September 9, 2014 a training session took place, dedicated to end-users of process simulation. The outline can be found here. Nine participants took part in this course.
- Philippe GUITTARD from ProSim SA presented on BatchColumn making use of CAPE-OPEN Property Packages. BatchColumn is a piece of software dedicated to the simulation of batch distillation recipes.
- The leader of the UNIT Special Interest Group (SIG), Krishna Murthy PENUKONDA presented the work done by the UNIT SIG over the last year.
- Mauricio LOPEZ from Bryan Research and Engineering demonstrated the CAPE-OPEN interoperability with ProMax™. ProMax is able to consume 3rd parties PMCs (thermo and unit) and specialty thermodynamic and unit operation PMCs are made avalable by ProMax™. The described features are included in the upcoming 4.0 release.
- Martin ROSS, UniSim Product Manager at Honeywell, provided an update on CAPE-OPEN in UniSim Design, praising the CAPE-OPEN Consultancy Service scheme that was used to upgrade the Unit Operation socket in UniSim Design. Martin shared also some strategic thoughts on CAPE-OPEN positioning as an interoperability technology.
- Jasper van BATEN (AmsterCHEM) gave a talk on COM and CAPE-OPEN without fringes, explaining how a CAPE-OPEN COM component can be developed without having to rely on the Active Template Library (ATL), meant originally by Microsoft to simplify the programming of COM objects, but still way too complicated for the rather simple COM aspects used in most CAPE-OPEN objects. This presentation was timely with respect to development plans of several products.
- Sergej BLAGOV from BASF SE and co-leader of the Thermo SIG, presented a report on the activities of this SIG along the past year. Sergej emphasized the new concepts and features of the Chemical Reaction interface specification under current revision, especially the ones pertaining to the true and apparent approaches of relevance for treating electrolyte systems or associating mixtures.
- Victor RUEHLE, Physical Property Specialist at Infochem–KBC Advanced Technologies described recent advancements in the Multiflash CAPE-OPEN interface and its integration into PetroSIM, the KBC process simulator software. The capability introduced in PetroSIM to handle all phase types provided by the underlying thermodynamic package, was demonstrated.
- A proposal by the Thermo SIG to deprecate version 1.0 was discussed. Unfortunately the conference call arranged to let others participate in the discusion was nt attended. Still the discussion provided directions on how to proceed.
- Roar NILSEN, K-Spice Product Manager at Kongsberg Oil and Technologies (KOGT), presented the newly available CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic socket in K-Spice. This socket is used to develop tables of thermodynamic properties at a given composition. The values in these tables are subsequently interpolated to deliver the data necessary to the process model. In the future KOGT will see how updating the tables can be handled throughout a simulation.
- Krishna Murthy PENUKONDA from SimSci (Schneider Electric) gave an update on the CAPE-OPEN implementation present in PRO/II 9.3 and 9.4. The openness of this presentation on issues resolved was noted. Also it should provide hints for other PME developers on where to check their implementations because several issues covered were rather generic.
- Jasper van BATEN presented the report on the Methods and Tools SIG activities on behalf of Bill BARRETT (US EPA), leader of that SIG. Several issues dealt by Errata and Clarifications documents pertaining to Common Interfaces were detailed for published errata or errata under development.
- Malcolm WOODMAN from BP presented work done on the Type Libraries and Primary Interoperability Assemblies installer as per the activities of the Interoperability Task Force dedicated at delivering software helping with the implementation of CAPE-OPEN interfaces. While done jointly with the Methods and Tools SIG, further rewiew of this work is being sought before general public release.
- The conference ended with a discussion session on the Future Directions of CAPE-OPEN. A detailed report on this session will be provided later by CO-LaN’s Management Board.
It was a pleasure to meet, discuss, share with representatives from Air Liquide, AmsterCHEM, Bantrel, BASF, BP, Bryan Research & Engineering, Cameron, ChemStations, Honeywell, Heat Transfer Research Inc., KBC Advanced Technologies, Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies, Linde Engineering, LRGP, ProSim, Shell Global Solutions, Schneider Electric, Technische Universitat Berlin, Technip Benelux b.V., TOTAL, Vienna University of Technology.