An extension of COSMOthermo with CAPE-OPEN interfaces has been developed. The objective was to plug COSMO-RS as an activity model into existing property packages by means of a CAPE-OPEN interface so that existing property packages can make use of the improved thermodynamic model. COSMOtherm is able to provide valuable thermodynamic data that can be used in a Process Modelling & Engineering (PME) simulation environment. The classical approach of applying thermodynamical data computed by COSMOtherm within PME simulations is to fit the data to an activity coefficient model and feed this to the PME simulation as pseudo-experimental data. This approach has two flaws: First, some amount of COSMOtherm’s accuracy is lost if the computed activity coefficients are fitted to an activity coefficient model like UNIQUAC or NRTL. Second, the fitting procedure and the feeding of the data into the PME simulator involve some manual work and time effort that the chemical engineer often does not want to invest. From these considerations COSMOlogic has developed a direct way of incorporating COSMOtherm computed thermodynamic data into PME systems: COSMOthermCO. CAPE-OPEN COSMOthermCO makes available COSMOtherm calculated properties in Process Modeling & Engineering software applications via CAPE-OPEN standard interface definitions.
COSMOthermCO is commercially available from COSMOlogic GmbH & Co KG. A restricted demonstration version COSMOthermCO-LITE is available within the free COCO (Version 1.06 and later) process simulation program.