Within the 3rd CAPE-OPEN European Conference, also known as the CAPE-OPEN 2006 Annual Meeting, Gregor FERNHOLZ, a senior consultant from Process Systems Enterprise and Michel PONS (Contractor for CO-LaN as Chief Technology Officer), demonstrate (PDF, 218 Kbytes) how a rigorous state-of-the-art model of a heat integrated distillation column (HiDiC) is implemented and simulated in gPROMS, exported into a CAPE-OPEN Unit plug and finally used in an Aspen Plus flowsheet.
Gregor starts by describing what is a heat integrated distillation column and in what respect it is advantageous to consider that type of column in a process. The internally heat integrated distillation column is a complex column configuration which is more energy efficient than the equivalent conventional column or the distillation column with direct vapor recompression scheme (VRC). Exploiting the heat integration between two diabatic sections operating at different pressures of the HIDiC can greatly enhance the energy performance of the system. On the other hand, the design and optimization of HIDiC is more difficult than those of the conventional distillation column or the column with VRC. Gregor points to the gain in energy taking the example of a BTX process.
Next Gregor / Michel show how to build a HIDIC model in gPROMS through elements of the GLC library, how to export it using gO:CAPE-OPEN and how to make use of it in Aspen Plus.
One of the major achievements of CAPE-OPEN is certainly the enhanced interoperability of simulation software packages enabling the end user to simultaneously take full advantage of the strengths of several software packages and to minimise the model implementation effort at the same time. This presentation is the demonstration of this achievement.
Note: live demos were made and these demos were unfortunately not recorded, Hence the missing elements in the presentation.