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Description:
The use of computer simulation is now a basic tool for process design and optimization as evidenced by its increasing use of practicing engineers through commercially available simulator software products. Engineers, in charge of designing equipment for the hydrometallurgical plants have to be able to select the most suitable equipment for each application and to predict the performances under different process conditions. In order to allow the process engineers to concentrate on their task, the simulation software has to offer a user-friendly interface combined with quick and accurate calculations.
A new simulator is under development, which offers a fully graphical user-interface, open database connectivity and application oriented unit model library. The purpose of the developed software is to integrate the already existent calculation algorithms, database files and process unit models into a completely new user-friendly and open-architecture system. The above mentioned knowledge exists in universities and companies under different representation forms. In the field of hydrometallurgy the simulation facilities offered by the available commercial software products are very limited and the unit models usually are fixed. Our aim is to implement specific unit models and to adapt them to the research and/or industrial application in study. At this stage the focus is on the hydrometallurgical process, however in future the research might concentrate on other process units depending on the industrial demand.
The most important feature of this software is to gather all the following proprieties:
o graphical user interface
o specific unit models for hydrometallurgical applications
o chemical database with open connectivity
o dynamic simulation
o steady-state material and energy balance calculations
o model development possibilities
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