The most powerful multi-purpose simulators offer ideal platforms for the new trend towards multi-scale modelling (see below).Ĭomputational fluid dynamics (CFD) uses equations describing turbulence and heat transfer in bulk fluids to model engineering problems involving fluid flow.
In turn, Modelica can be used with a number of commercial front-ends including Wolfram SystemModeler and SimulationX (ITI, Germany).įor the most difficult tasks, multi-purpose simulators can run on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, often taking advantage of each server’s graphics processing unit (GPU) as well as the main floating point processor (CPU). The open source Modelica modelling language, for instance, allows users to create and link blocks of equations describing, say, individual items on a flowsheet. Combining flexibility with great power, these can model mathematical functions, process plants, mechanical devices and electrical systems. Spreadsheets have now been joined by multi-purpose modelling environments such as Mathematica/Wolfram SystemModeler (Wolfram Research, USA), Matlab/Simulink (MathWorks, USA), and dozens of alternatives.
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Spreadsheets made it much easier to solve the complex sets of simultaneous equations that characterize plant flowsheets, and enabled design improvements through a series of “what-if?” calculations. In the early 1980s the first spreadsheets – VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 – made microcomputers a practical everyday tool for chemical engineers.
But this was difficult stuff, often left to departmental experts and not for one-off use. Since then, advances in computer power and mathematics have enabled both highly complex time-independent optimizations such as protein folding, and also dynamic simulations of gas flows, combustion modelling, and advanced process control.įor many decades, libraries of numerical methods were available on mainframes and minicomputers to anyone with the skill to write their own mathematical models. But since it is often easier to write differential equations than to solve them, practical solutions to many engineering design problems had to wait until computers could provide brute-force solutions (“numerical methods”). Much of the mathematics underlying heat and mass transfer dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Accordingly, mathematical models of physical, chemical and thermal phenomena lie at the core of engineering, many branches of chemistry, and increasingly the biological sciences too. Only when we can forecast how a process or a molecule will behave, independently of experiment, can we claim real understanding. Prediction is a vital part of the scientific method.
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Open source simulators offer a serious alternative to commercial software in several areas, while powerful general-purpose modelling tools and “multi-scale” models are blurring the boundaries between different types of simulation. Computational fluid dynamics and molecular modelling, in contrast, have had more room to advance, and are now able to replace a great deal of experimental work. Flowsheet simulators, a defining tool for every chemical engineer since the 1990s, have seen incremental improvements in power and usability over recent years. Posts are frequently caught by the spam filter and it may take a few days to notice without contacting one of us.As engineers and scientists strive to do more with less, computer modelling has become essential to cut costs, speed development and reduce uncertainty when designing everything from processes to molecules. If your post is not showing up, message the mods.
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