Sergi is Managing Director and co-founder of Virtual Materials Group Europe, S.L., a subsidiary of Virtual Material Group serving the European market. Sergi was previously involved with CAPE-OPEN while at Hyprotech Europe as Technical Services Manager, before the acquisition of Hyprotech by Aspen Technology.
The tests Sergi and Nicolau conducted were to assess:
- the maturity of the CAPE-OPEN standard
- the maturity of VMG implementation of CAPE-OPEN
- the availability of tools
They ported a sample simulation case, originally set up in VMGSim, to COFE from AmsterCHEM. They created a CAPE-OPEN Property Package out of VMGThermo so that it may be exercized by COFE for the flowsheet considered, indeed fully rebuilding the simulation case. They focus on a demethanizer where a non-standard thermodynamic model capable to predict vapor-solid as well as vapor-liquid equilibrium is used.
They conclude to an excellent job done by CAPE-OPEN since connection of COFE with VMGThermo was easy, even with
phase mapping involved, and use of non-standard thermodynamics was capable to predict solid CO2 formation within the COFE flowsheet.