(344c) An Introduction to COCO

COCO is a CAPE-OPEN based steady state flowsheet simulation environment. COCO consists out of 4 components: a flowsheeting environment (COFE), a CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic system (TEA), a set of CAPE OPEN unit operations (COUSCOUS) and a CAPE-OPEN reaction package manager (CORN). COCO is created with CAPE-OPEN interoperability testing and development in mind, but features a fully functional flowsheet simulation environment. TEA comes with an extensive thermodynamic library, available in CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic standard versions 1.0 and 1.1. The thermodynamic property calculations and compound libraries are based on over 10 year experience of the distillation column simulation package ChemSep (http://www.chemsep.com/). Whereas other simulation environments offer access to simulation components via CAPE-OPEN interfaces, COCO is modeled around CAPE-OPEN interfaces. The flowsheeting environment does not have integrated unit operation models or thermodynamic calculations. All such calculations are done via CAPE-OPEN interfaces. This setup allows for using each of the components in combination with any other equivalent CAPE-OPEN compliant components. COCO can be downloaded for free at http://www.cocosimulator.org/. Within the CAPE-OPEN community, COCO is extensively used for interoperability testing. As a result of its free availability and extensive usage, COCO frequently receives feedback on CAPE-OPEN interfacing and interoperability issues. For the COCO development team this provides a means to remain up-to-date with the latest CAPE-OPEN developments; the COCO developers actively take part in several CAPE-OPEN special interest groups (SIGs). This presentation will give an introduction to COCO and addresses some features that highlight the current development and CAPE-OPEN status.