Amp Up Your Engineering Toolkit with Modeling Skills!

Modeling and simulation are essential tools in every facet of the process industry with applications continually increasing. The ready availability of powerful computational tools like spreadsheets, Mathematica, MATLAB, SciPy, COMSOL along with traditional flowsheet models means that advanced computations have become an expectation rather than an exception. Developing modeling skills will give you a competitive advantage over your model-free peers.

In this talk, we present some best practices for developing these modeling skills, and executing a successful modeling project. We will also present several advanced modeling and simulation examples to show the range of applications.

1. Quantum chemistry is used as a fundamental modeling tool to obtain radical polymerization reaction rates (Zhu, Konstantinov, Arturo, Yu)
2. The method of moments is applied to model a polymeric system, which is then used in conjunction with optimization to improve the manufacturing of polymers (Shi, Biegler, Hamdan)
3. A mixed-integer linear programming model is developed for long-term turnaround planning of integrated chemical sites (Amaran, Sahinidis, Sharda)
4. Group contribution property models are used to reverse engineer molecules that are likely to meet both product specifications and performance requirements (Samudra, Sahinidis, Trahan)