Advanced Process Engineering Co-Simulator

Advanced Process Engineering Co-Simulator (APECS), winner of an R&D100 and Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Mid-Atlantic Region Technology Transfer award, was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The APECS is a tool to enable the process and energy industries to co-simulate aggressive performance and environmental targets for their production plants and simultaneously optimize them for the most profitable operation.

The process and energy industries manage some of the most sophisticated and expensive plants in the world, spending on the order of $600 billion annually in plant design, operation, and maintenance. APECS allows the industries to better understand and optimize overall plant performance with respect to complex thermal and fluid flow phenomena. These industries also face the challenge of designing next-generation plants to operate with unprecedented efficiency and near-zero emissions, while operating profitably amid cost fluctuations for raw materials, finished products, and energy. To achieve performance targets and at the same time reduce the number of costly pilot-scale and demonstration facilities, the designers of future plants must rely on high-fidelity computer simulations to design and evaluate virtual plants.

APECS helps to optimize overall plant performance with respect to complex thermal and fluid flow phenomena

The APECS software technology provides the necessary level of detail and accuracy essential for virtual plant co-simulation by combining best-in-class process simulation and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with high-performance computing and interactive, immersive, 3D plant walk-through virtual engineering software. At NETL, system analysts are applying APECS to reduce the time, cost, and technical risk of developing high-efficiency, nearly emission-free power plants, such as the coal-fired, gasification-based plant in the $1 billion, 10-year DOE FutureGen R&D Initiative.

The tools used by NETL to transfer the APECS technology included a DOE-funded cooperative R&D project and agreement among NETL; Fluent, the world's leading supplier CFD software and services; Aspen Technology, a major supplier of process simulation software; West Virginia University; and Alstom Power, a major worldwide industrial player in equipment and services for power generation. The cooperative agreement assigned the commercialization rights to Fluent to ensure that the APECS software suite entered the market place as quickly as possible.