Development Of Object-Oriented Chemical Engineering Toolbox

With the continuous development of the theories and applications in the field of the chemical engineering and computer technology, more rigorous requests arise for the chemical process simulation. But many computer techniques have not been explored for chemical engineering applications. So in this paper many newest and advanced computer techniques were combined with the process simulation software design, the paper outlines the construction of the chemical engineering toolbox (ChET), a software support environment developed to aid chemical process simulation. Based on the Matlab/Simulink language, the toolbox can serve as a rapid, visualized and proficient tool for chemical software development. ChET introduces an object-oriented approach to modeling of chemical processes. The model representation is object-oriented and the simulation problem solving is equation-oriented. Through abstracting the common features of respective chemical unit operations, ChET builds up a class library for chemical process simulation. The class library can efficiently facilitate the reuse of the resources of the process simulation. ChET follows the regulations of the component object model and the distributed component object model. It combines the distributed computing and networking technology with the techniques of software development and constructs a whole new flexible module for the design of chemical simulation software. With the module, We successfully build up a distributed dynamic link library for computing the properties of the multi-component flux in a Rectisol process. The simulation results precisely correlate tothe computing results of well-established Fortran programs. In order to reuse the Fortran codes, which are age-old but have been widely tested by different engineering practice, compound language programming was used to design ChET. We resort to the ActiveX in order to combine the Fortran language with the Matlab language seamlessly. This obviously raises the develop proficiency of the simulation software. Based on the process simulation class library, a visualized drag-and-drop environment for chemical process simulation was built up. ChET was used to simulate chemical process made up of a reactor and a distillation column and the simulation results correlate well with the results of Aspen Plus. This example shows that ChET has significant potential for simulating a chemical process successfully and proficiently.