Process simulation

The duty of the reboiler and overhead condenser are calculated by the model to achieve a specified composition or other parameter of the bottom and/or top product.

The simulation calculates the chemical and physical properties of the product streams, each is assigned a unique number which is used in the mass and energy diagram.

Process simulation uses models which introduce approximations and assumptions but allow the description of a property over a wide range of temperatures and pressures which might not be covered by available real data.

Process simulation is therefore a field where practitioners from chemistry, physics, computer science, mathematics, and engineering work together.

Despite this advantage predicted properties are normally only used in early stages of the process development to find first approximate solutions and to exclude false pathways because these estimation methods normally introduce higher errors than correlations obtained from real data.

Early implementations of partial aspects of chemical processes were introduced in the 1970s when suitable hardware and software (here mainly the programming languages FORTRAN and C) became available.

It can be seen as a multiple repeated steady state simulation (based on a fixed time step) with constantly changing parameters.