External Thermodynamic Packages
The thermodynamics functionality includes support for creating properties from external thermodynamic packages. In order to use external packages, the external software has to be CAPE-OPEN compliant. Thermodynamics in COMSOL Multiphysics supports the CAPE-OPEN Thermo 1.1 and the CAPE-OPEN Thermo 1.0 standards.
CAPE-OPEN is an open interface standard for chemical process simulation software (Ref. 1). This standard defines rules and interfaces that allows linking between compliant software. Some examples of CAPE-OPEN compliant software are:
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COCO/TEA (Free of charge package provider; see Ref. 2).
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Multiflash™ (KBC Advanced Technologies plc).
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VMGThermo™ (Virtual Materials Group, Inc.).
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Simulis® Thermodynamics (ProsSim SA).
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Aspen Properties, aspenONE® (Aspen Technology, Inc.).
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COMThermo® packages (comes with Aspen HYSYS®).
Accessing external thermodynamic systems allows species properties, mixture properties, as well as phases equilibrium calculations (gas–vapor, liquid–liquid) to be obtained from external software, such as the ones listed above.
Installing External Thermodynamic Packages — An Example
TEA is a thermodynamics thermodynamic system that handles the physical and thermodynamic property calculations for the simulation environment COCO. The property data bank contains more than 190 commonly used chemicals, and the package exhibits more than 100 property calculation routines with their analytical or numerical derivatives. COCO is maintained by AmsterCHEM and is free to download from the Internet (Ref. 2).
To use the external physical and thermodynamic property calculations from COCO/TEA in COMSOL Multiphysics models, you need to go through the following steps:
1
Download and install COCO, which includes the TEA thermodynamic system manager. The software is available from www.cocosimulator.org/index_download.html.
2
Create and configure a thermodynamic system template that handles physical and thermodynamics calculations needed for your model. If you have already created a package template earlier, or if an adequate thermodynamic system already exists in the installation, this step is not needed.
3
Create an External Thermodynamic System node as detailed in the next section. The installed packages are available in the Select Property Package step of the Thermodynamic System Wizard.