Project description: COSPPTS: CAPE-OPEN-compliant version of the Shell Physical Properties Package

The effort to develop an in-house physical properties package at Shell started many years ago when databases were not commercially available. Over the years, data of high-quality for many compounds specific to the Shell group were gathered in experiments and formulas, which are partly in-house Shell models, were fitted against this data. In order to preserve this large investment it was decided to equip the physical properties package with CAPE-OPEN interfaces in order to make further use of the package within commercial simulation software.

Benefits achieved

The use of in-house physical properties was difficult until the advent of the CAPE-OPEN standard and the corresponding extension of the in-house properties package called COSPPTS. Due to different software interfaces of other packages, software had to be continually modified, or, due to different formulas of thermodynamic models, parameters had to be re-fitted against the experimental data when a different tool was to be used. With the successful migration towards the CAPE-OPEN physical properties interfaces, these steps are no longer necessary. Instead, the existing and proven properties data can be used in a plug and play manner within every CAPE-OPEN compliant process engineering software. The main work of this project was done within half a year, although validation, testing, and improvement carried on beyond that period. The actual coding work for COSPPTS was subcontracted to Hyprotech and minor support from CO-LaN concerning open issues in the CAPE-OPEN standard was appreciated. With this experience from the COSPPTS project, Shell is now motivating software suppliers and cooperation partners to develop fully CAPE-OPEN compliant interfaces for their process engineering tools in order to realize the received benefits also in other areas of process engineering.

Other information

More information regarding the availability of COSPPTS and the properties package is available upon request.