ABSTRACT
In process engineering, the simulation, design, and optimization of a chemical process plant, which comprises several processing units interconnected by process streams, are the core activities. The purpose of simulation is to model and predict the performance of a process. Aspen Plus is designed for the simulation of steady-state processes; especially those that are computationally laborious to analyze by hand calculations, such as processes involving recycle streams, nonideal phase or chemical equilibria, and adiabatic operations. Aspen Plus predicts process behavior using engineering relationships, such as mass and energy balances, phase and chemical equilibria, and reaction kinetics. The base of Aspen Plus is flowsheet simulation use of a computer program to quantitatively model the characteristic equations of a chemical process. The sequential modular approach is based on the concept of modularity, which extends the chemical engineering concept of unit operation to a “unit calculation” of the computer code responsible for the calculations of an equipment.
