COCO

COCO is an application suite that integrates a simulation environment for chemical operations, together with several tools to help you design experiments in a virtual workspace and examine results.

These include a CAPE-OPEN flowsheeting environment (COFE), thermodynamics for engineering applications (TEA), CAPE-OPEN simple unit operations (COUSCOUS), and CAPE-OPEN reaction numerics (CORN).

Apart from the core files, the full package covers apps for simulating separation columns (ChemSep LITE), ab initio activity coefficient calculations (CosmoTherm LITE), extensive logging of property packages (OATS) and unit operation logging (OATS).

Additional components include a Waste Reduction WAR algorithm, .NET CAPE-OPEN class libraries, and an Excel-based CAPE-OPEN unit operation using thermo version 1.1. Any of these modules can be excluded from installation.

The flowsheeting environment lets you create projects by inserting normal, energy and information streams, controllers, flow constraints, bitmap images, and a wide range of unit operations powered by COUSCOUS, such as pumps, compressors, separators, reactors, heaters, coolers, heat exchangers, pipes, vales, mixers, and splitters.

Plus, you can compile and insert reports with streams, authors, unit operations and parameters, as well as use some basic drawing tools, like object, line, text, label, hyperlink, oval and rectangle.

The flowsheet can be configured when it comes to its material types, the stream and unit operation order, reaction and property packs, compounds, and other properties, before validating and solving it. COFE lets you generate plots for the temperature, pressure, composition, bubble point temp, temperature or pressure with reaction data, or array parameters obtained from unit operations.

TEA has internal material objects that are similar to the ones in COFE. The same restrictions are applicable, and the tool can export both CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic standard versions 1.0 and 1.1. It includes some default property pack templates and allows you to edit their properties, such as compounds, the equilibrium, external routines, property calculations, interaction settings, and group contributions. Templates can be deleted and put together from scratch too.

COUSCOUS contains a large collection of CAPE-OPEN compliant unit operations and can be used in COFE for model steady state operations of chemical processes. It features a compound splitter, compressor, expander, equilibrium and fixed conversion reactors, flash, turbine, valve, and others.

CORN is a reaction package system supported by CAPE-OPEN, which implements reaction packs and reaction pack templates (configurations for reaction packs). New configurations can be created by adding preferred compounds and reactions, and they can be accessed from within COFE.

Aside from the previous extra modules we mentioned in the setup phase, COCO makes room for even more tools: a IAPWS-97-based steam and water standalone property package (Water), the CAPE-OPEN registry kit (CORK), an out-of-process thermo server and CAPE-OPEN logging tool (OATS), a Microsoft Excel template that integrates COFE documents into an Excel workbook (COFE.xlt), an editor for unit operation icons (JUIcE), and a TERNarY plugin used for creating phase diagrams, property plots and residue curves of ternary systems (TERNYP).

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, since the apps didn't hang, crash or display errors. CPU and RAM consumption was minimal. Taking into account its advanced options and configuration properties, COCO proves to be a reliable software suite for users who want to simulate chemical operations in a virtual environment.