The safety of industrial plants is the most important concern of everyone related to the process industry. Accidents in chemical plants make headline news. To prevent any possibility that lives of people or property is put to danger, each company is expected to develop and enforce its own practices in the design, installation, testing, and maintenance of safety systems and procedures. Importance of the dynamic simulation for this purpose is increasing.

Safety, environmental, and economic factors highlight the importance of understanding the design and operating of the plant, as well as the sufficient training of the plant personnel. Dynamic simulation is the only economically effective solution to these needs, since it yields a lot more information than what traditional steady state simulation offers. This is because dynamic simulation allows us to study a plant’s behavior in a wide range of operation conditions, like during start-up or shutdown and emergency situations.

Steady state process simulation is universally accepted as an essential tool for project development across the process industries. Every process engineer expects to have easy access to Hysys or one of its derivatives or competitors for developing process heat and mass balances. Dynamic process simulation, however, is still seen as a “nice to have” by many projects despite the clear benefits it can bring. So what are the benefits of using dynamic simulation, and why is it not being used more routinely? This article aims to answer these questions, with specific reference to the Upstream Oil & Gas Industry, but close parallels exist in most sectors of the Process Industries.

The use of functional block diagrams as the tools for mathematical modeling, visual programming and simulation has become very popular and continues to be more and more present. The reason behind it has become so popular lies in the fact that by visualizing the interactions between variables, we are able to visualize our problem as well - which is helping us on the way to a solution. 

Today, the simulation of process dynamics is bringing us as close as possible to the real process. With dynamic simulation, we are integrating process design, process technology, safety, process control, control strategy and process operation into one discipline.