(263e) Petroleum Properties Via CAPE-OPEN: From Prototype to Commercial Application

In-house refinery models are widely used within Shell for a variety of applications, including product predictions for design and revamp, performance monitoring and plant/refinery wide optimization. These models can be accessed uniformly and efficiently via a proprietary interface that is similar to CAPE-OPEN. A link between the Shell proprietary interface and CAPE-OPEN is all that is required to deploy these models from mainstream process modeling applications.

For traditional components, the CAPE-OPEN standards have been well established and are widely used. In the petroleum industry however, all compounds that boil in a given temperature range are lumped into a so-called pseudo component. This pseudo component is characterized by properties such as molecular weight, boiling point and density. Whereas normally such properties are provided by the thermodynamics server and passed on to the unit operation, in petroleum processing such properties are calculated by conversion reactors and passed on to the thermodynamics system. In addition, petroleum pseudo compounds are characterized by inspection properties like sulfur content, RON and MON numbers, which may also be predicted by petroleum conversion reactors.

Follow-up to the preliminary work of the former CAPE-OPEN Petroleum properties Special Interest Group (SIG), an interface standard for petroleum properties is prototyped and implemented by the Shell process modelframework. A socket is implemented by SimSci-Esscor in their Pro/II process simulator. This presentation will highlight the essentials of the CAPE-OPEN petroleum properties interface specifications and demonstrate its functionality.