DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNOLOGIES AND ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES FOR VISION 21 ENERGY PLANTS
To accelerate the development of advanced power plants, DOE's Vision 21 program identified the need for an integrated suite of software tools that could be used to simulate and visualize new plant concepts. Existing process simulation software did not meet this objective of virtual-plant simulation. Sophisticated models of many individual equipment items are available; however, a seamless coupling capability that would integrate the advanced equipment (component) models to the process (system) simulation software remained to be developed. The inability to use models in an integrated manner causes knowledge loss (e.g., knowledge captured in detailed equipment models is usually not available in process simulation) and modeling inconsistencies (e.g., physical properties and reaction kinetics data in different models are not the same). A team consisting of Fluent Inc., ALSTOM Power Inc., Aspen Technology Inc., Intergraph Corporation, and West Virginia University, in collaboration with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), addressed this challenge in a project performed over the period from October 2000 through December 2004. In this project the integration of the cycle analysis software was based on widely used commercial software: Aspen Plus{reg_sign} for process simulation and FLUENT{reg_sign} for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of equipment items. The integration software was designed to also include custom (in-house, proprietary, legacy) equipment models that often encapsulate the experience from the many years of designing and operating the equipment. The team adopted CAPE-OPEN (CO) interfaces, the de facto international standard for communication among process models, for exchanging information between software. The software developed in this project is the first demonstration of the use of CO interfaces to link CFD and custom equipment models with process simulators. New interface requirements identified during this project were communicated to the CO standard developers. The new software capability was designed to make the construction of integrated models fast and integrated simulations robust and user-friendly. Configuration wizards were developed to make CFD and custom models CO-compliant. An Integration Controller and CFD Model Database were developed to facilitate the exchange of information between equipment and process models. A reduced order model (ROM) framework and a solution strategy capability were incorporated in the Integration Controller to enable a flexible trade-off between simulation speed and complexity. A CFD viewer was developed so that process engineers can view CFD results from the process simulator interface.
- Research Organization:
- Fluent Inc. (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC26-00NT40954
- OSTI ID:
- 841446
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1 Apr 2005
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Virtual Simulation of Vision 21 Energy Plants
DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNOLOGIES AND ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES FOR VISION 21 ENERGY PLANTS