Petro-SIM Themes

Petro-SIM 5 incorporates all the functionality of Petro-SIM 4.1 predominantly used by the downstream community in refining and petrochemicals and Petro-SIM Production 4.2, introduced for the upstream community. The core of both programs was identical with Petro-SIM Production taking on different defaults and behaviors with regard to stream properties and available unit operations.

In Petro-SIM 5 there is only one program regardless of the flavour of Petro-SIM you may be used to and you will find only one shortcut on your Start menu after installation. Petro-SIM 5 has two themes built-in (Petro-SIM Production and Petro-SIM Refining) and these themes take on the role of determining what is visible and what you can do. You will find the setting on the Preferences view (Display tab, General page):

The Petro-SIM Production theme will hide the Refinery unit operations from the Ribbon Home tab and from the object palette though still allow their use in cases. It will also set the stream property reporting rules to a production-centric set, showing only production relevant properties in the stream property manager. Properties and extended stream compositions will also generally calculate on a wet basis, taking water into account where present. The Flowsheet Report utility will have a Shrinkage page and report shrinkage losses.

The Petro-SIM Refining theme shows the Refinery unit operations on the Ribbon Home tab and object palette and sets the stream property reporting rules to those applicable to refineries and downstream operations. Properties and extended stream composition generally calculate on a dry basis, ignoring water unless otherwise indicated.

The Combined theme makes everything available. You can change the theme at any time but it only takes effect when you next start the program.

Where is Petro-SIM Express?

We have modified our licensing structure to make it much easier to understand the different versions. There is now one base version - Petro-SIM - and the name Express is no longer be used. The right to carry out refinery-wide modelling is still a separate license but the program will only check it out when the case you are loading or the actions you are trying to perform require it, then keeping the license for the duration of the session. Hence you do not need to know in advance what type of license you need: the program will check out the minimum necessary.

Petro-SIM 5 will load any Petro-SIM case regardless of the licenses you may have and it will drop back to the Viewer mode where it cannot get licenses. The program will also continue to respect settings in existing license files that you have, correctly interpreting Petro-SIM Express, Production, Rx, Viewer and the full refinery-wide licenses.