Within the CAPE-OPEN 2016 Annual Meeting, Krishna Murthy PENUKONDA (Schneider Electric) reported (PDF, 517 Kbytes) on the activities conducted by the UNIT Special Interest Group over the period from October 2015 till September 2016.
Krishna Murthy PENUKONDA is the current leader of the UNIT Special Interest Group. Krishna Murthy first listed the responsibilities given to the UNIT Special Interest Group which are within the SIG Charter and that have been unchanged since the previous year. Then the list of currently active members of the SIG (regularly participating in conference calls organized monthly by the SIG) is provided: it includes, on top of Krishna Murthy, Richard BAUR (Shell Global Solutions), Jasper van BATEN (AmsterCHEM), Michael HLAVINKA (Bryan Research & Engineering) and Michel PONS (CO-LaN). Additional members are welcome and should contact Krishna Murthy.
Then Krishna Murthy provided an update on the revision of the Petroleum Fractions interface specification.
The scope and requirements sections have been updated to reflect the current decisions made. Some clarifications was added to the text in terms of functionality to better outline the limits given to the scope. State and sequence diagrams have been added to further explain the design.
On the scope, it has been clarified that currently the interface specification is meant to provide communication between a Refinery-specific Unit Operation and a Process Modelling Environment. The communication between a Property Package and a Process Modelling Environment, in whatever it may be specific to Petroleum Fractions, is out of the scope. Also curve properties are not considered in the scope either.
The major clarification added pertains to an issue raised at the meeting organized for the UNIT Special Interest Group at the end of the CAPE-OPEN 2015 Annual Meeting: for a given Unit Operation, how to deal with multiple feeds containing different pseudo compound slates? Two solutions can be considered, one giving the responsibility to the Process Modelling Environment, the other giving the responsibility to the Unit Operation. It was decided to retain the solution where the Process Modelling Environment is responsible for handling the situation. Handling the situation means that the PME has responsibility for making uniform compound slates on all Ports of a Unit Operation. This responsibility for identical feed compounds only pertains to material streams containing Petroleum Fractions.
Another clarification was about the granularity of petroleum properties. It is recognized that petroleum properties exist in three different levels of granularity: bulk properties, curve properties and compound properties. Compound properties are providing the finest granularity. A Refinery Reactor Unit Operation should set a Petroleum Property in the finest granularity it can predict, so preferably the values of that property for each pseudo-compound. Also a Refinery Reactor Unit may not set conflicting granularities of a petroleum property. On the Process Modelling Environment side, it may store the property in any chosen granularity provided it must be able to return the property in the granularity it was specified.
Objectives for the UNIT Special Interest Group for the period till the next CAPE-OPEN Annual Meeting include submitting a Request for Comments on the revised Petroleum Fractions interface specification document.