DEVELOPMENT OF USER-DEFINED EXTENSION FOR THE SIMULATION OF MEMBRANE PROCESS IN ASPEN HYSYS

Membrane gas separation has gained an important place in process industry for various applications. ASPEN HYSYS is a widely used commercial simulation software for process flow design. However, there is no built-in unit operation available in ASPEN HYSYS for membrane processes. In this research work, a user-defined extension has been developed and implemented by using commercial process simulators ASPEN HYSYS. The module has been used for the design and simulation of membrane processes. The benefit of this user defined extension is that it can be easily linked with ASPEN HYSYS. A CO2 selective membrane has been used to separate CO2 from the flue gas as a case study. This work analyses the effect of two-stage membrane process, using different streams, and having different process configurations. The results have been verified with the data available in the literature. The proposed unit operation extension shows good agreement with published results.

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