Development of mass balance simulator based on the MS excel

Abstract

Process simulator is performed mainly for two different purposes - design of a new process and assessment of an existing process. For the design purpose, it is crucial to simulate the unit processes rigorously since little information is known for them. But for the assessment purpose, a lot of operating condition and data are given, validation of these data becomes an important issue. Since most of commercial process simulators cover the two cases simultaneously, they are neither cost-effective nor suitable to deal with given data if the user is only interested in assessing material and / or energy balance of existing processes. Present research aims at developing a simple process simulator which is capable to calculate the steady-state mass balance as well as to reconcile the noisy operating data. In this study, steady-state material balance simulator which: is based on the I/O Matrix that describes process flow diagram automatically generates source code for material balance model automatically detects recycle stream and minimizes the problem size uses MS Excel “solversolve” function to obtain the numerical result has been developed. The simulator has been successfully applied to example processes.