Development of a CAPE-OPEN Simulation Component for a GAMS-modeled Process Unit

ALEJANDRO O. DOMANCICH; PEREZ V.L.; HOCH P; BRIGNOLE N.B.

Computer Aided Chemical Engineering

ELSEVIER

Lugar: Braunschweig, Joulia; Año: 2008; p. 10 - 16

In this paper, a method to incorporate a GAMS-modeled process unit in HYSYS is presented. The design and implementation of a user-friendly GAMS-compatible module that supports the CAPE-Open (CO) interface were carried out. More specifically, a COcompatible simulation component for a reactive distillation column was developed. HYSYS was used in order to test the developed component, which became an available extension on the list of operation units. One of CO wizards that targets the mechanical generation of the Operation Unit (OU) Package was used. This wizard generates a Visual Basic project containing the source code of the OU and the installation package. In particular, the calculation routine and the Graphical Unit Interface (GUI) were implemented. The GAMS model was modified in order to read input values from a GDX file. An Excel file, which contains the user-defined parameters and the incoming stream properties, was created in the GUI written in Visual Basic programming language. Afterwards, the GDX file was created from the Excel file using the GDXXRW utility of GAMS. We have attained the technical know-how about the method to incorporate a user-defined item of equipment that was both previously modeled and simulated via GAMS. The reactive distillation column module embedded in HYSYS profits from its complete property-package, which is lacking in GAMS, in order to carry out the accurate computation of the chemical and equilibrium properties.