Development of a membrane process in CAPE-OPEN to CAPE-OPEN (COCO) simulator for carbon dioxide separation

Abstract

Commercial process simulation software like HYSYS® and UniSIM® are available but they require a license to operate. CAPE-OPEN to CAPE-OPEN (COCO) is a free process simulation software that includes many unit operations. In terms of material and energy balance, COCO gives very close results compared to commercial software. Gas-separation membrane can be developed manually in HYSYS® and UniSIM® using a component splitter but this unit is not available in COCO. In this work, a membrane module was built in COCO with the use of the open-source numerical computational application (Scilab). The membrane unit was developed by writing material and energy balance equations in Scilab. The equations were solved numerically by changing the permeate-cut values. The code was then integrated into COCO using the Scilab plugin. The built code was tested with an industrial membrane unit for carbon dioxide separation from flue gas. Results show that the module gives an acceptable error of 4.5 % when performing material and energy balance compared to real data.