Overview
The goal of the project was to develop the next version of the fluid property sublibrary of the Modelica Standard Library (MSL). The currently available fluids will be kept, but there is a need to extend the MSL with properties for multi-phase multi-component fluids. Most fluid properties available today are in specialised programs written in C or Fortran, like MultiFlash by InfoChem or FluidProp by TU Delft, or they are part of process engineering simulators. That makes it necessary to include external interfaces to access these properties from Modelica. CAPE-OPEN is the best known interface with many properties available and is a natural first choice. On the other hand it is necessary to support encapsulated models as standardized in the FMI-standard, which is also maintained by the Modelica Association. Therefore, a native C/C++/Fortran interface was also developed in this project. The results were going to be integrated into the Modelica Standard Library.
Funding
Results
Executive Summary:
In this project a Modelica library for multi-phase multi-component fluids has been developed together with an external C/C++ Modelica property interface with back ends to CAPE-OPEN, RefProp and FluidProp. The framework also contains a Modelica library for distillation processes for verification and testing of the media interface design. The availability of properties for steam and flue gases initiated the use of Modelica in the power industry, where it today is a well-established technology with several commercial and open source libraries available. High quality fluid properties are laborious to produce and their non-availability is therefore a typical blocking argument for the use of a certain tool or technology. In this project we have also developed requirement specification of an open-source framework for multi-phase multi-component thermo properties in Modelica. The goal was to have a standardised interface to multi-component multi-phase fluids with access to external property packages in Modelica. This made it easier to develop models for e.g. the process industry. The library used a model based interface and implications of such a design are analysed and compared with the traditional function based interface.