Why is chemical process simulation used in the chemical industry?

This question is like asking, what is the need to eat or drink? Everything in the chemical industry and everything in the business should be designed before you do any next step. Chemical process simulation is the design step that allows testing the capability of the equipment to reach the goals of the process. The meaning of these, what will be the yield, what will be the productivity, the purity and the operation that will be achieved in this equipment. It’s very clear about why we need to have simulation tools in our industry and I agree that we should have as many different types of simulations as possible. The general one is a simulation tool that performs a mass balance or energy balance exercise at every big unit.
For instance, you have reactions and you have heat release; hence, you need to know what amount of heat will be released in the reaction in order to prepare all the facilities to remove this energy and maintain the desired process temperature. We also have a specific simulation tools that are designed for experts that will investigate deeply the phenomena that occur in the process. And these kinds of tools like a physical properties of the media, to know what will be the density, viscosity, a mass transfer, heat conductivity or mass conductivity, etc., requires more a specific knowledge about the specific issue.

In our case, where we talk about VisiMix, we are talking about a very specific mixing knowledge, but it is a basic one. With no knowledge about what is the environment you’re providing to your process; it will be impossible to assure that you will be able to succeed. The mixing is the environment you are generating. So you need to calculate it, you need to understand if this environment is good for process. Once you understand the working environment that is necessary, you will then be able to a design a relevant experiment in the lab that will reflect what will happen in the production step; once we know it, we will be able to improve the chemical industry in a good way. The same is true when we’re talking about technology transfer, operations, and improvements needed to do our processes. For this, we have the simulation tool and after that we can design an experiment that will be relevant and representative of the process that we want to improve. Again, it is like you asked me why you need to drink or to eat.

VisiMix Video

The Influence of Mixing in the Process
New methodology using VisiMix software for the purpose of checking the influence of mixing in the processes.

VisiMix Demo Operation
Learning how to input data into the VisiMix software and get results the will help us understand the influence of mixing in our processes.

Lab Experiments
Learning how to set up the relevant experiments at the lab scale, to develop the processes from an engineering point of view.