Product reviews / Simulation

One of the most important reasons that process simulation is not used more across the industry is the price of the simulation packages. Although, the price can be easily justified with the benefits achieved, it still very often remains an obstacle, especially for small engineering companies. This article presents some of the available open source process simulators. 

The different packages can be applied to solve typical problems in mass and energy balance, fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, unit operations, reactor engineering, and process and equipment design and control. 

In this article, we highlight the most important tools and packages with their capabilities, based on the available professional experience of an author, available literature and discussions.

Steady-state and dynamic plant simulation are powerful tools that help engineers create optimal process designs to analyze plant operations, to develop performance improvement strategies, monitor and optimize operations and much more.
We are providing a full list of process simulator packages with their key characteristics. They are available for different industries, purposes, scales and under different commercial conditions. While some of them are very expensive, there are as well affordable ones and even a couple of them that are totally free of charge. So, no more excuses for not using process simulation tools.

You can apply programming skills in many areas of Chemical engineering. It can be either at the industrial scale or in research labs and it can include everything from process modeling, analysis, identification, planning, setup, control, maintenance etc.