Industrial Success Stories in Process Simulations with Matlab and Simulink

Process engineers are continually searching for ways to enhance their operations through data collection and analysis, first principles modeling of unit operations, simulations and optimization of plants. There are many computational tools chemical engineers use ranging from general programming languages to specialized, graphical environments to simulate chemical processes. Tasks chemical engineers complete with such tools range from solving differential equations, algebraic equations, optimization problems, modeling dynamic systems, steady-state systems, discrete systems, data acquisition and analysis. MATLAB is a high-level technical computing language and Simulink is a graphical environment to design, simulate and test systems in industry and academia. MATLAB and Simulink enable users take a model-based design approach in designing or maintaining processes and apply increasingly used data science techniques like Deep Learning, Machine Learning to chemical process industries. In this talk, we will focus on user stories on model-based drug development, automation the monitoring of control loops in refineries, predictive maintenance using a digital twin, modeling and optimizing a catalytic system, how control engineers and chemical engineers can work together in modeling an industrial, chemical process using the model-based design tools. Through the user stories, we will present how computational tools assist process engineers solve modeling and simulation problems in different application areas.

Some of the computational tools and programming languages come across in chemical engineering industry and education are AspenPlus, ChemCAD, HYSYS, MATLAB, Python, C, C++, FORTRAN. As there are various programming languages and tools available to chemical engineers for modeling chemical systems and processes, integrating different parts of the models that are developed in different tools might pose challenges. We will discuss how interoperability of MATLAB with other programming languages can help engineers and scientists overcome such challenges while modeling chemical processes.