Considering that a membrane absorber module is not available in process simulators, they developed a one-dimensional mathematical model of membrane absorption in MATLAB® by incorporating an ionic liquid as absorbent. As explained by the authors “The liquid is assumed to flow through the tube side, while the gases pass through the shell side of the membrane contactor in parallel and counter current direction to the liquid stream. The material and energy balances are applied on the membrane absorber to get the molar flow rates of CO2 and H2 both in gas and liquid phases, and temperature profiles along the length of membrane contactor. Differential equations emerge due to mass and heat balances are solved by method of orthogonal collocation method and f-solve in MATLAB.”
The authors explicitely refer to the MATLAB CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation provided by AmsterCHEM when writing “The mathematical model of membrane absorber is then communicated to HYSYS via CAPE-OPEN extension tool provided by Amsterchem.“. As a justification for their choice of such a way to embed a unit operation model in Aspen Hysys, they further state “This tool is relatively easy as compared to other computational languages.”
CO-LaN welcomes this new example of use of CAPE-OPEN technology to link the model of a specialized unit operation to a process simulator where the entire flowsheet of the process is modelled.