Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA): Instituto Mexicano Del Petroleo Cooperative Program for the ASPEN Flowsheet Simulator: Status Report

摘要

On June 20, 1983, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the US Department of Energy, and the Instituto Mexicano del Petroleo (IMP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that established a program of cooperation between the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IMP. This report describes the work done under Annex II of the MOU, which set up a program in the area of process simulation using the ASPEN flowsheet simulator. As a part of this program, two IMP engineers were trained at Los Alamos: one as an ASPEN system administrator and the other as an ASPEN applications engineer. After returning to Mexico, these engineers installed ASPEN on the IMP VAX computer and trained 30 other IMP engineers and scientists to use ASPEN. To date, IMP used ASPEN to simulate four major process plants. In addition, engineers from Los Alamos and IMP worked together during the summer of 1986 to develop an implementation of the UNIFAC method for predicting liquid-phase activity coefficients. The code was written and installed in ASPEN and has passed a series of initial test cases. The UNIFAC model will be released to the public domain when testing is complete. IMP has also developed and shared with Los Alamos some enhancements to a computer code that predicts physical property correlation constants for petroleum fractions. The success of the Los Alamos/IMP cooperative program for the ASPEN flowsheet simulator demonstrates that technology transfer can work in both directions. 18 refs. (ERA citation 12:012970)