ChENGINEER SPACE

Simulator42 is an open source process sim­u­la­tor project with the goal of pro­vid­ing an afford­able and acces­si­ble chem­i­cal process sim­u­la­tor to the chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing community.

Some inter­est­ing fea­tures of the project:

• It is being writ­ten in the Python language.
• The sim­u­la­tor core has been designed to be inde­pen­dent of both user inter­faces and thermo providers.
• The flow sheet solver can prop­a­gate par­tial infor­ma­tion both back­ward and for­ward through the flow sheet. This fea­ture allows many com­plex prob­lems to be solved with­out iter­a­tive cal­cu­la­tion of recy­cle loops. Con­sis­tency checks are used to avoid unin­tended over spec­i­fi­ca­tion of problems.
• A dis­til­la­tion col­umn employ­ing a Rus­sell inside/out algo­rithm and capa­ble of solv­ing com­plex pump around and side strip­per prob­lems has been implemented.
• Sev­eral user inter­faces are already avail­able or being devel­oped for Sim42, includ­ing a basic com­mand line inter­face, a graph­i­cal inter­face based on wxWin­dows, a web browser based interface/server and a pro­fes­sional com­mer­cial interface.

Simulator42 does not have an owner thermo pack­age how­ever it makes avail­able using the com­mer­cial thermo pack­age of VMG (Vir­tual Mate­ri­als Group, Inc). VMG pack­age is free to use through Redlich-Kwong model.? In 2007 OllinTS project started the devel­op­ing of an open source ther­mo­dy­namic server that could be used by Sim42.

Unfor­tu­nately Sim42 project was aban­doned in 2005/2006. So there is not a sup­port web­site or offi­cial repos­i­tory from Sim42’s code/package (see the old orig­i­nal web­site in Inter­net Archive Way­back Machine). Nev­er­the­less, the last ver­sion (2.0.0.0) for Win­dows can be down­loaded from alter­na­tive mirrors.

Mir­rors:

• http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=206963
• http://engenhariaquimica.googlegroups.com/web/sim42full_2v0.zip

Sim42 requires the instal­la­tion of Python 2.2.2+, Numer­i­cal Python 22+ pack­age and a ther­mo­dy­namic server (VMG or OllinTS).

ASCEND is an open source mod­el­ling envi­ron­ment and solver for large or small sys­tems of non-linear equa­tions, for use in engi­neer­ing, ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, chem­istry, physics, math­e­mat­ics and biol­ogy. Solvers for both steady and dynamic (NLA & DAE) prob­lems, are pro­vided. It offers:

- An object-oriented model descrip­tion lan­guage for describ­ing your system,

- An inter­ac­tive user inter­face that allows you to solve your model and explore the effect of chang­ing the model para­me­ters, and

- A script­ing envi­ron­ment that allows you to auto­mate your more com­plex sim­u­la­tion problems.

ASCEND was orig­i­nally writ­ten at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity in the 1980s and includes pow­er­ful and reli­able solver rou­tines that analyse the struc­ture of your model and can solve thou­sands of simul­ta­ne­ous non­lin­ear equa­tions in a few sec­onds on every­day com­puter hard­ware. It is under active devel­op­ment and is licensed under the GNU Gen­eral Pub­lic License ensur­ing that it is free soft­ware and will remain free.

Project web­site:

• http://ascend.cheme.cmu.edu

Screen­shots:

PyGTK ASCEND GUI

Graphic plot­ting

Scilab is an open source plat­form for numer­i­cal com­pu­ta­tion pro­vid­ing a pow­er­ful open com­put­ing envi­ron­ment for engi­neer­ing and sci­en­tific appli­ca­tions.
Since 1994 it has been dis­trib­uted freely along with the source code via the Inter­net. It is cur­rently used in edu­ca­tional and indus­trial envi­ron­ments around the world. Scilab is now the respon­si­bil­ity of the Scilab con­sor­tium, launched in May 2003. There are cur­rently 18 mem­bers in Scilab Con­sor­tium (Phase II).
Scilab includes hun­dreds of math­e­mat­i­cal func­tions with the pos­si­bil­ity to add inter­ac­tively pro­grams from var­i­ous lan­guages (C, C++, For­tran?).
It has sophis­ti­cated data struc­tures (includ­ing lists, poly­no­mi­als, ratio­nal func­tions, lin­ear sys­tems…), an inter­preter and a high level pro­gram­ming language.

Scilab is very sim­i­lar to com­er­cial soft­ware Mat­lab from Math­Works, Inc. Scilab also pro­vides a tool of block dia­gram modeler/simulator Sci­cos (equiv­a­lent to Mat­lab Simulink). In other words, any Mat­lab user can eas­ily use Scilab with­out much lose in functionality.

Project site:

• http://www.scilab.org

Screen­shots:

Main Scilab GUI

Sci­cos GUI