Catalogue Based Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) of Process Models

Abstract

In chemical industries, many hardware and software problems of chemical plants become obvious during start-up and commissioning and must be corrected in a way which is resource intensive in terms of time and money. The correction procedure continues until the desired operating performance has been achieved and efficient control has been established. In order to achieve at least an acceptable performance, often temporary solutions are established which may have drawbacks in terms of functionality and efficiency.

Many developments in modelling and simulation have already been undertaken to reduce such deficiencies during the early engineering phases. However, none of these approaches aim at the dynamic simulation of the plant design situation at the end of plant design, where in principle all components are completely specified -ready-to-order- and no parameterisation degrees of freedom are left as in the early design phases.

The subject of this work is the development of an integrated approach to automatically generate the required plant simulation models from a simulation model catalogue of physical components after completion of the engineering process, without requiring modelling expertise from the planning engineer to run the simulation. In this work, the approach is named "ModelCAT".

The availability of simulation models is a basic prerequisite for this approach and has led to a methodology for the definition of the simulation model requirements to be used at the end of plant design, by integrating them into CAE-plant design tool's databases. The core of this work is the model aggregation module (MAM), a methodology for the automatic aggregation of plant models based on the plant design information and including the simulation models. MAM contains a systematic analysis of the plant to be simulated and the aggregation of simulation models for their use in a simulation environment, which includes a process and a control simulator. In order to support planning engineers, who are assumed to be non-experts in the field of modelling and simulation, to establish simulations based on plant design, this work presents a concept for a smart graphical user interface (GUI), as an integral part of this ModelCAT approach.

To validate the proposed approach and associated methods, a prototype software environment has been established. It has shown that the concept is feasible and promising in establishing dynamic simulations on virtual plants at the end of detailed engineering. The experiences and knowledge gained from the prototype realisation and validation have used to extrapolate to the requirements for an industrial implementation.

Date of Award	May 2007
Original language	English
Supervisor	Giuliano Premier (Supervisor)