The virtual plant, really here and now
15 Jan 2000
As the pictures around these pages show, Achema is undoubtedly one hell of a hardware show. But it's also the place to see the latest in engineering software.
Making one of the biggest splashes this year was a consortium of Silicon Graphics, Cray Research and, from the UK, CADCentre and Imperial College's Centre for Process Systems Engineering. Combining the (computer) hardware and software expertise of each, what was claimed as the `world's first Virtual Plant' was unveiled to crowds eager to see how a dynamic simulator could be linked in real-time to a 3D `walk-through' visualisation of a plant (pictured).
`High performance 3D visualisation helps give an instant understanding of a plant layout,' said CADCentre's David Wheeldon. `The Virtual Plant takes that further by highlighting the chemical process themselves with in the visualisation.'
According to Imperial's Professor Sandro Macchietto, `it displays the complex information content of process simulation in a new and exciting way.' Using their gPROMS simulation software (see PE, December 1996 p24, and April 1997 p27) the Imperial team modelled an existing pilot plant, while CADCentre built the 3D visualisation using its Review Reality interactive software. Silicon Graphics' Onyx supercomputer handled both the simulation and `walk-through'.
Collaborations such as this for Virtual Plant may become even more commonplace thanks to the commercialisation of Bayer's Simulation Manager software. Again running on Silicon Graphics hardware, this package - designed according to the evolving standards of the CAPE(Computer Aided Process Engineering)-Open consortium of European process companies - integrates different process simulators together, allowing them to be controlled on a network with a common graphical user interface. In this way, whole plants can now be run as one huge simulation, with data from separate simulated process units being interchangeable.
Inevitably, Simulation Manager has been snapped up by one of the simulators. SimSci (Simulation Sciences) announced at Achema an agreement with Bayer for exclusive rights to commercialise and market the software.
