Pedro Cobas. Head of the EcosimPro/PROOSIS Development Team
Over the last few months the EcosimPro/PROOSIS team have developed new applications in innovative areas that highlight the tool’s ability to handle projects across different disciplines. In fact, one of the great advantages of a multi-disciplinary tool like EcosimPro is its ability to model widely differing systems that can be described using equations. And our long experience has taught us that the best way to do it is to model these systems with the general approach of acausal modelling and object oriented programming.
This issue includes an interview with the two CERN engineers who developed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) control system using EcosimPro to simulate the cryogenic processes. We believe that is very interesting, as the processes modelled were very complex and the control requirements were very demanding. Based on this experience, the first commercial version of the CRYOLIB library has just been released to the market; this library can be used to model cryogenic systems like the LHC at a very detailed level. This issue contains information about this new library.
This new issue also features a project developed this year by EA: the modelling of a complete oxy-combustion plant in great detail. Thermal power generation plants produce a lot of CO2, which is a problem as it is discharged to the atmosphere. Experimental plants attempt to reduce the quantities of CO2 discharged to the atmosphere, by isolating it previously and pumping it to a CO2 storage chamber. For this European project, a complete model of the CO2 capturing plant was prepared, including the (very complex) boiler, the cycle, a pure oxygen production unit, a compression unit to isolate the CO2, etc. This will allow simulations of real situations at the plant before it is built. There is no doubt that this type of work helps the engineers to optimize the design of these types of thermal power plants, as they can simulate realistic operating situations or extreme failure cases before construction. The final model developed in EcosimPro is very complex and includes thousands of equations and variables, demonstrating once again EcosimPro’s ability to solve complex problems.
This issue also contains two new EcosimPro libraries: an electric machine library, and a library for desalination plants.
The new Electric machine library covers an area not previously covered: the modelling of complex electrical systems such as machines, electricity networks, etc. The library includes typical components in this industry such as power converters, single-phase and three-phase transformers, rotary electrical machines, synchronous and asynchronous machines, coordinate converters, etc. There are over 80 new electrical components that can be used to create these types of systems.
The other library is the ROSIM library used to model desalination plants and which was developed by the University of Valladolid for EcosimPro. This new professional library covers the modelling of complete desalination plants. It includes over 80 components such as reverse osmosis membranes, filters, chemical purification systems, power recovery, typical hydraulic components used in this industry and control elements. This library is available already for end-users who want to work in this area.
Lastly, there is a report on one of the latest capabilities of EcosimPro/PROOSIS, which is the exportation of models, almost automatically, to OPC environments that allow connection to other systems, such as a SCADA for remote viewing and control of the model. We believe that this new capability will be very important to the processing industry, as it allows control of the simulation from the final control system of the plant in a very transparent manner for the end-user.
We are currently working on many new areas of EcosimPro/PROOSIS, such as new, more powerful mathematical solvers, parallelization of calculations, connection to databases, etc, that we hope will be implemented in the upcoming versions of EcosimPro/PROOSIS.