Petro-SIM 4.1 - Full change list

  • Significant upgrades to the heat exchange operations
    • New HX Monitor Utility (requires extra license) that provides methods for calculating and tracking fouling in heat exchanger networks and optimizing cleaning individual exchangers, groups of exchangers or the whole network.
    • Upgraded steady-state rating method to incorporate the Bell-Delaware method for calculating heat transfer coefficients
    • Enhanced heat exchanger fouling calculations
    • Report results through TEMA spec sheets
    • Tight two-way integration with Xist from HTRI
    • Fired heater and related unit operation improvements including
      • Coking kinetics to enable coke laydown prediction and tracking
      • New tuning factors for coke and tube metal thermal conductivity
      • Enhanced reporting for vapor and liquid properties on a tube by tube basis, adding density, viscosity, thermal conductivity and heat capacity to both liquid and vapor phase reporting plus wt% vaporized.
      • New flux option that allows you to provide a flux profile
      • Support for heat losses through negative fluxes
  • Data reconciliation upgrade improvements
    • User interface revamp
    • New options for specifying measurement error (relative, absolute, no error, estimate from balance)
    • Component balances for light ends
    • Heat balance mechanism to support HX Monitor
    • Reporting upgrades
  • Reactor process technology enhancements:
    • Revamped ISOM-SIM reactor offering auto-calibration and tuning of key reactions and more robust temperature response predictions
    • Enhanced hydrogen balance options in FCC-SIM
    • Better default coke on catalyst response for CCR reactors in REF-SIM, reducing the need to calibrate this response if data is inconsistent or unavailable
    • New options for cold property shifts across hydrotreater and hydrocracker reactors
    • New Coker Furnace object for use with Delayed Coker simulations, allowing more detailed analysis of the Coker Furnace.
    • Enhancements to the Visbreaker, VGO Cracker, and Coker Furnaces, providing:
      • Coking kinetics to enable coke laydown prediction and tracking
      • New tuning factors for Coke and Tube Metal thermal conductivity
      • Enhanced reporting for vapor and liquid properties on a tube by tube basis, adding Density, Viscosity, Thermal Conductivity and Heat Capacity to both liquid and vapor phase reporting plus wt% vaporized.
      • New flux option that allows you to provide a flux profile
      • Support for heat losses through negative fluxes
    • Enhanced reporting from Pyrolysis Furnace (Olefin-SIM)
  • SIM model/Excel interface usability improvements
    • More flexible optimizer input page
    • Profiles charts function to plot multiple profiles (distillations, tube profiles and so on) on the same chart
    • Revised charts variable layout and zoom functionality
    • Enhanced calibration factor loading options, allowing you to export factors to any reactor of the same type in any Petro-SIM case
    • Required feed and product stream properties for the reactor workbook now highlighted on the Input pages
    • Option to check for gross mass balance errors during validate
    • Historian import options to pull multiple data sets into Excel
    • Recent files list on the Petro-SIM ribbon
  • Calibration system enhancements to simplify use:
    • Publish and Subscribe mechanism for unit calibration data enhanced with support for public and private revisions, allowing you to test your changes before you make them public to all subscribers
    • New PFD stream highlights for easier understanding of calibration setup
    • Method to support yield properties, allowing you to enter yields instead of flows for use in calibration
  • Enhanced support for performance monitoring, adding more reporting functionality to the Excel framework and simplifying the building
    • New KPI Utility to allow you to create key performance indicators. It supports built-in, customizable status indicators to track case completion as well as any user-defined indicator incorporating flowsheet parameters.
    • Script tags for the Historian interface, allowing tags to be calculated based on other tags
    • Automatic build of base cases through the Data Reconciliation utility and KPI Utility; separate spreadsheet unit operations are no longer required
    • Enhanced reporting through Excel with simplified user interface for occasional users checking results
  • Dynamic simulation is included and works with streams that include refinery assays
  • Column enhancements
    • Easy Thermosyphon reboiler setup through options on the Column wizard
    • Easy Liquid bypass support and setup through options on the SideOps wizard
    • Smarter auto reset and restart during calculations
    • You can now more easily select a group of components to a range of specifications on component flow, fraction, recovery and ratio
  • LP Utility enhancements
    • More robust regression calculations
    • Ability to specify display order for streams and properties used in generating LP tables
    • Support for long LP tag names in auto-generated tables and templates
    • Ability to re-run and collect a single dataset to aid analysis of datasets with convergence issues
    • Automatic retry mechanism for datasets that fail to converge by stepping back to basecase before retrying at dataset conditions
    • Submodel validation with automatic comparison of submodel-predicted value versus flowsheet-predicted value for all datasets collected by the LP Utility
  • Basis and Oil Manager enhancements to simplify handling multiple assays, improve technology and features
    • Oils button on toolbar allows direct access to a pre-built Oils base case without having to load a specific case
    • Direct import of HCAMS assays (requires that you have licensed HCAMS from Haverly and it is installed on your computer)
    • Enhanced change management options for assays on Petro-SIM databases with support for public and private revisions and easier configuration of case runtime checks for assay updates
    • Bulk process options to let you work with multiple assays at the same time
    • Cetane D4737 properties now support A and B calculation methods
    • Additional detail to the extended component scheme, expanding the C6 to C8 Olefins groups with specific isomers including Di-Olefins and adding isomers to the C9 and C10 Aromatics groups
    • Added support for Cape-OPEN Thermo packages supporting the Cape-Open 1.1 standard
  • General user interface and related improvements
    • Preferences revamp with reorganized view
    • Changes to unit set handling to simply use with spreadsheets and minimize proliferation
    • Improved font and Unicode support, with change to default font to fit Windows 7 standard
    • Enhanced dropdown buttons with default click actions
    • New "Send to Favourites" option to allow you to add shortcuts to the case Navigator pane
    • Option to pin files on the most recently used file lists, allowing you to keep your favorite files in easy reach
    • Trace commands for extended components available on stream composition right-click menu
    • New right-click options on the Solver buttons on the toolbar to make it easy to force a case to re-solve entirely
    • Enhanced multiple monitor support, enabling you to drag windows outside the Petro-SIM frame by holding the Control key down while dragging the window with the mouse
    • User-controllable matrix cell action on pressing the Enter key, letting you specify how the active cell position should move
    • Enhanced tooltip information in stream views on stream properties with multiple calculation methods such as density and viscosity to help you determine the calculation basis
    • Ability to add custom stream types through Preferences to help you manage property selection on stream Property pages. Use custom types when you want more granularity than the built-in types provide.
    • Mechanism added to allow you to generate and email shortcuts to database cases
    • Enhanced translation support to cover greater range of refinery unit operation messages
    • Addition of the COBYLA algorithm to the Optimizer
  • Database enhancements
    • Support for the SQLite database engine, making it the default database engine for single user application. SQLite is a widely used engine supported on a wide variety of platforms from mobile phones to server computers.
    • Change management layer available for installation and use on Microsoft SQL Server, managed through the Database Explorer
    • Database Explorer enhancements to show when collections are locked (checked out), together with right-click menu commands to lock, unlock and submit revisions
    • Database Explorer supports database connection strings generated by Petro-SIM

Version 4.1 also incorporates all of the corrections and upgrades included in service packs for the 4.0 release. Cases from older versions will re-synthesize all assays on load to make sure that results are consistent with all the assay synthesis improvements made since the original 4.0.