Process Simulation Platform for Sustainable Design and Operations

Global sustainability imperatives are rapidly driving the process industries to embrace a circular economy to reduce waste and a hydrogen economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New processes must be put in place in the next decades which will require an acceleration of the engineering, design, and commissioning of these new plants to meet government objectives.

This presentation focuses on how a new simulation platform can address the challenges faced by today’s mainstream single-purpose simulation tools to overcome these sustainability imperatives:

1. An open modelling approach to shorten the development time of a new “renewables” model library for wind, solar, and electrolysis to model the hydrogen value chain in mainstream flowsheet simulation and deploy circular processes.
2. An Engineering “Digital Twin” that accelerates the design phase of the new plants by allowing collaboration of process engineering with other engineering disciples to verify mechanical, piping, and control design through hydraulic analysis and dynamic simulation.
3. An Operations “Digital Twin” that reuses the engineering process models online to minimize their equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, possibly augmented by data-driven models that use Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

The presentation will introduce AVEVA Process Simulation as an example of a simulation platform that can simultaneously model new sustainable processes as well as accelerate their engineering design.