14-12-2012

ProSim receives the cape open award

ProSim has now joined the prestigious recipients of this award: Siegfried Nagel (2001), Daniel Piñol, Michael Halloran and Richard Szczepanski (2002), Hans Horst Mayer (2003), Pascal Roux (2004), Fernando Aguirre from HTRI (2005), Jasper van Baten from Amsterchem (2006), Peter Banks (2007), Bill Barrett (2008), SolidSim Engineering GmbH (2009) and Bertrand Braunschweig (2010).

Philippe Arpentinier, representative of Air Liquide in the CO-LaN Board of Directors has recently awarded the trophy to Prosim (Photo 2).

The commitment of ProSim in the CAPE-OPEN technologies is hardly new. Laurent Jourda, in particular, provided all his expertise to the implementation of the first concepts during the CAPE-OPEN then GLOBAL CAPE-OPEN R&D projects in the late 1990s. This expertise has been then maintained and enriched in the ProSim development teams. Skills acquired in the CAPE-OPEN technologies, in particular by Alain Vacher, have also been shared with the CAPE (Computer Aided Process Engineering) community by organizing training sessions about CAPE-OPEN standards implementation attended by many industrials, like in San Francisco, CA, in November 2006.

The underlying concepts, such as interoperability and component-oriented software architecture have been taken into account from the beginning of the development of tools such as Simulis Thermodynamics (mixture properties and fluid phase equilibria calculations). This enables ProSim software to possess today an unmatched level of compatibility with CAPE-OPEN standards. Simulis Thermodynamics implements the Thermo 1.0 and Thermo 1.1 “plug” standards, which allows to generate CAPE-OPEN compatible “Property Packages” that can be used in any compatible environments (AspenPlus, AspenHysys, ProII, Xist, etc.).

Furthermore, the Thermo 1.0 and Thermo 1.1 “socket” standards implementation makes it possible to use external “Property Packages” (generated by Multiflash, AspenProperties, COCO TEA, …) in Simulis Thermodynamics. Each software that embeds the Simulis Thermodynamics component automatically inherits this compatibility at the thermodynamic level. This is the case not only for the ProSim software (ProsimPlus, BatchColumn, BatchReactor,…), but also for the developments done in Excel or for in-house codes that use Simulis Thermodynamics. On the other side, ProSimPlus, steady-state simulation and optimization of processes software, implements the “socket” CAPE-OPEN standard for unit operation, that enables to integrate external unit operation modules (Xist from HTRI, ChemSep,…). Some examples of this interoperability had been presented several years ago at the AIChE Annual Meeting 2006 (San Francisco, CA) "ProSimPlus new CAPE-OPEN capabilities" (A. Vacher et al. - paper # 535b).

For the chemical engineering software user, the great strength of CAPE-OPEN standards lies in the use of “external” software components (unit operations or “Property Packages”) that can be done without programming any line of code and that is entirely seamless; it is sufficient to have the external component on one’s PC to be able to use it in the software as a “native” component.