Based on the expert advice of Greg Shinskey and others, ProcessApex provides real-time advice for process unit operations. It handles unit operations from simple to complex. Individual process objects include common operations, such as heat exchangers, dryers and distillation columns. Each “smart” unit operation provides real-time performance metrics that address throughput, quality, reliability and cost. A direct link with the company’s PlantTriage system allows users to drill down into specific performance issues.

The companion software to Crane’s Technical Paper 410, Flow of Fluids Premium simulates the operation of small piping systems. It calculates results for series, branched and looped systems — whether opened or closed — for up to 25 pipelines. The program boasts the ability to select pumps directly from over 85 electronic pump catalogs. Key enhancements include new visual features, such as the option of creating piping system models as 2-D or isometric drawings, and a new Shape Editor that enables users to create custom shapes for pumps, tanks, components and control valves.

The web-browser version of FastMaint, the newly released FastMaint Web CMMS 5.0 is a computerized maintenance management solution (CMMS) that is well-suited for manufacturing plants and other industrial/commercial facilities. Customers have a choice of using a built-in web server or Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. Both planned and preventive maintenance tasks can be scheduled, managed and tracked. An integrated inventory system allows one to track inventory use and schedule the reordering of parts.

Working in conjunction with the substance database in the SAP EH&S application, Ariel Expert Rules streamlines the global chemical regulatory management process and reduces the amount of time spent researching, understanding and applying chemical and regulatory information. It can be run against both mixtures and components, and can make determinations using basic data, such as physical-chemical properties, toxicological test results and safety data, in the same way a material safety data sheet (MSDS) author would.

 The brainchild of Professor Fabian Mauss from the Univ. of Cottbus in Germany, DARS V1.0 is an easy-to-use tool for simulating complex chemistry with complicated kinetic mechanisms in engineering applications. DARS’s reaction reduction capabilities deliver significant times savings compared to computational models. Its Java graphical user interface (GUI) and object-oriented programming result in an intuitive and familiar working environment.

The steady-state process simulator ProSimPlus now comes with the software component Simulis Thermodynamics. Within the ProSimPlus environment, it is possible to graphically visualize the pure component properties and to calculate phase equilibria or any type of transport and thermodynamic properties on the components of the process. The latest release of ProSimPlus is also CAPE-OPEN compliant, allowing users to integrate third-party CAPE-OPEN unit operations and to create CAPE-OPEN property packages.

Core solver improvements are the main focus of the recently released FLUENT 6.3 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. A pressure-based coupled solver joins the existing solver options and improves solution efficiency, as well as convergence and robustness for many cases. Also new are polyhedral meshes, which allow the flexibility of an unstructured mesh to be applied to complex geometries without the overhead associated with a large tetrahedral mesh.

STAR-CD V4.02, the second major release of this simulation tool for computational continuum mechanics and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), provides direct access to the latest automatic surface cleaning and mesh generation technology from within a single integrated environment. Pioneered in sister code STAR-CCM+, this technology can reduce the time-to-mesh from days to hours.

Three new features are offered in version 7.3 of this firm’s Engineering Fluid Dynamics (EFD) analysis, which consists of EFD.Lab, EFD.V5 for CATIA V5 and EFD.Pro for Pro/ENGINEER. The first feature is 64-bit processor support. The EFD family can now be run on 64-bit machines. As a result, users will be able to analyze very large problems, those generally regarded as too large or too time consuming, directly on the desktop. With a scalable solution that can readily adapt to user needs, the EFD suite can now be deployed across the enterprise.

ESS Crisis is a robust browser-based solution that provides fast, easy, reliable information management for real-time response operations. The system can be adapted to fit any incident management structure and its intuitive interface is so simple to use that new team members can be up and running in just a few minutes. Available as a secure hosted, on-demand or onsite system, ESS Crisis features automated remote notification, which uses text-to-speech technology to send urgent messages to regulators, responders or stakeholders.