Integrating Coding Platforms with Process Simulators for Custom Applications

With rapid material, process, and computation advances, traditional process simulators’ modelling, simulation, and optimization capabilities may not always suffice. Many process applications, research efforts, and tool developments demand integrating two or more independent, diverse, and disparate software platforms. Finding the details quickly for such an integration has always been a challenge faced by researchers, developers, and practitioners alike. This work presents a comprehensive tutorial for interfacing Python and Aspen HYSYS and achieving efficient information flow between them. The hierarchy of the Aspen HYSYS objects, their associated attributes, and built-in functions are discussed with examples. Strategies to handle unique objects (e.g., Column, Spreadsheet etc.) and backdoor variables are also presented. We further show how these ideas can be used for applications like technoeconomic assessment and simulation-based optimization. Lastly, we discuss how these ideas can be extended to MATLAB.