Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
By Peter Reynolds
Keywords
Engineering Simulation, SimSci, Agile, Process Engineering, SimCentral,
Schneider Electric
Summary
Oil price volatility tied to overcapacities has squeezed margins across the
oil & gas industry, significantly reducing capital spend on major expansion
projects, increasing the need to optimize existing assets, debottleneck
plants, and take out cost across the board. To support these objectives,
process and plant engineers need improved,
Oil price volatility tied to overcapacities has
easier to use design and simulation tools that
squeezed margins across the oil & gas
that reduce engineering time and effort, in-
industry, significantly reducing capital
spend on major expansion projects, crease design agility, and support emerging
increasing the need to optimize existing collaborative engineering approaches.
assets, debottleneck plants, and take out
cost across the board. To support these In the past, depending on the project phase
objectives, process and plant engineers (conceptual design, detail design, startup and
need improved, easier to use design and commissioning, process optimization, etc.)
simulation tools that that reduce and responsible party (process licensor, EPC,
engineering time and effort, increase design
owner-operator, etc.) a variety of different
agility, and support emerging collaborative
engineering tools supporting either steady
engineering approaches.
state or dynamic simulation were typically
employed, each with different models for
simulation, data entry requirements, and data and human interfaces. This
increases engineering effort and cost and inhibits agility. It also prohibits
effective use of concurrent engineering, which has been proven to reduce
costs and help compress project schedules.
uses, eliminate duplicate work, and diminish the large amount of tedious
and often repetitive data entry in engineering design.
Simulation-Driven Engineering
Since 1987, SimSci has been offering and improving its flagship simulation
product, PRO/II, to support steady-state modeling of heat and material
balances in hydrocarbon processing operations. In 2000, following the ac-
quisition of Esscor, with its proven DYNSIM product, the company could
add dynamic simulation to its software portfolio.
Usability
Engineers are becoming “casual” users of simulation tools (as opposed to
simulation experts). According to SimSci, unlike the many point solutions
previously available on the market, it designed SimCentral to be easy to
learn and easy to use,
ning simulations on the platform, engineers can easily recover from mis-
takes simply by hitting an “undo” button and creating snapshots.
Unifying three simulation modes (process, fluid flow, and dynamic) within
a single unified tool eliminates the need to use multiple simulation prod-
ucts for one plant. SimCentral incorporates the process model (previously
available in PRO/II), the fluid flow model (previously available in VISUAL
FLARE, INPLANT, and PIPEPHASE), and the dynamic model (previously
available in DYNSIM) into a single plant model that can work in all modes.
User Customizable
Engineers need to be able to customize the equations for new equipment
models without having to rely heavily on either their company’s central
development team, the SimSci development team, or both. The SimCentral
platform approach enables users to customize their own high-level interac-
tive models. Today, SimSci customers either use the cumbersome user
modeling tools in PRO/II, ROMeo, or DYNSIM. This requires program-
ming skills and custom modeling or they must submit a request to SimSci
product management, after which the request goes into a prioritized devel-
opment queue for SimSci developers to write in FORTRAN or C++, which
is both time consuming and inefficient.
For process engineers using legacy simulation products who don’t also
happen to be software developers, creating code for custom models can be
very difficult. Even something as simple as a one-line equation for an ero-
sional velocity calculation in a pipe would have to go into the SimSci
development queue. In the past, the only people who could address most
of these issues were those who knew both chemical and process engineer-
ing and had deep knowledge of the specific program (such as SimSci’s own
developers). This hampered simulation-related engineering activities for
end users and EPCs and made it difficult for value-added resellers to ex-
pand into new markets.
Providing users with the ability to modify and make their own model
changes is a key component for SimCentral. SimCentral users can build a
simulation that uses a new but incomplete model. As users add the equa-
tions interactively, the model tells them how much is missing and begins
working when complete.
are typically charged on usage, but can also be charged with a more
predictable flat rate. Cloud computing also supports data encryption to
secure simulations over the Internet. The one downside, however, in that
since customers cannot directly control network stability, they become
highly dependent on the service provider.
Conclusion
ARC believes that Schneider Electric’s recent investment in R&D and a
complete rewrite of the company’s widely used process simulation soft-
ware from the ground up to create the unified SimCentral platform, comes
at the right time to support the digital transformation of engineering and
operating companies. SimSci has committed to simplifying the use of its
technology and setting the stage to transform how process engineering is
executed.
the same platform, but in the same process model.
The new software also
allows multiple users to access the same model simultaneously, regardless
of time zone or geographical location. This enables model-driven, collabo-
rative design to leverage engineering talent across organizations, as well as
across the plant lifecycle.
Schneider Electric believes that EPCs and owner-operators can realize the
following benefits by using the SimCentral platform:
For further information or to provide feedback on this article, please contact your
account manager or the author at PReynolds@arcweb.com. ARC Views are pub-
lished and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to
ARC and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.