Excel CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation 1.0

The Excel CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation is a unit operation implementation for which the calculations can be entered in Microsoft Excel. It will allow you to create an Excel workbook that defines the equations for calculating a unit operation, and use it in a CAPE-OPEN compliant simulation environment that supports CAPE-OPEN version 1.1 thermodynamics.
The principle is simple; the workbook contains multiple work-sheets that have specific functionality. There is the feeds page, that will allow you to add and feeds simply by adding names of feeds to a table. During calculation, the feeds page will contain pressure, temperature, enthalpy, composition and flow for each feed. These are simply numbers that you can use in your calculations. Like the feeds sheet, there is a products sheet. Here you can add product streams by adding rows to a table. This sheet has cells for pressure, temperature, enthalpy, composition and flow as well. The values of these (two of three for pressure, temperature and enthalpy as well as composition and flow) need to be specified by Excel formulas. Like the feeds and products sheets, there are sheet for in- and output parameters.

A control sheet allow you to inspect all physical and thermodynamic properties that are supported by the simulation environment, for compounds constants, pressure- and temperature-dependent properties, single- and two-phase properties and equilibrium calculations. You can use all of these types of thermodynamic property calculations in your unit operation model. The control sheet also allows you to define reports, simply by identifying named regions in your workbook. More-over, the control sheet allows you to define whether and how to use the Excel solver for your model. Multiple solver models can be specified that will be solved sequentially during calculation. You can even specify which initial guess to use for your solver models.