Plant design: Integrating Plant and Equipment Models

Like power plant engineers, process plant engineers must design generating units to operate efficiently, cleanly, and profitably despite fluctuating costs for raw materials and fuels. To do so, they increasingly create virtual plants to enable evaluation of design concepts without the expense of building pilot-scale or demonstration facilities. Existing computational models describe an entire plant either as a network of simplified equipment models or as a single, very detailed equipment model. The Advanced Process Engineering Co-Simulator (APECS) project (Figure 5) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) seeks to bridge the gap between models by integrating plant modeling and equipment modeling software. The goal of the effort is to provide greater insight into the performance of proposed plant designs. The software integration was done using the process-industry standard CAPE-OPEN (Computer Aided Process Engineering–Open), or CO interface. Several demonstration cases based on operating power plants confirm the viability of this co-simulation approach.