Authors: Carl SANDROCK and Philip L. DE VAAL
Affiliation: University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0171, South Africa
Reference: Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, vol. 26, 2009, pp.859-864,
Abstract
“Modelica has emerged as a strong contender in the arena of dynamic simulation languages. It was developed to be a standard, with an open specification and a large and usable standard library. OpenModelica is an Open Source implementation of a Modelica compiler and environment which is being developed actively.
Modelica’s object-oriented design makes it easy to develop chemical engineering unit operations and connect them to one another. Unfortunately, most proprietary databases of thermodynamic and physical properties and reaction data are not supplied in equation form, but rather as part of closed software. This means that such data must be exchanged with the programs that contain them if they are to be used externally. The CAPE-OPEN specification provides a standard architecture for these exchanges, in addition to support for incorporating new unit operations or algorithms into existing proprietary simulations.
In this study, a Modelica library allowing interface between Modelica and CAPE-OPEN is developed. Its functionality is demonstrated using a model of a ten plate distillation column simulated in OpenModelica on a Linux machine, with thermodynamic and property data from Honeywell Unisim on a Windows machine. The simulation data interfacing is done over a network using CORBA. Physical plant data is also incorporated using OPC.
It is found that real-time operation is possible, but that network overhead makes up a significant fraction of the running time, posing problems for off-line simulation and optimization.”
DOI :10.1016/S1570-7946(09)70143-9
CAPE-OPEN related papers cited in text:
Belaud J.P. & Pons M. Open Software Architecture For Process Simulation. Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, volume 10, 2002, pp. 847-852.