CAPE-OPEN

I am interested in modeling some a variety of fuel stocks used to drive a process.

Is there a recommended reactor that can take a multiple input streams (fuel of various components in one stream, air in the other stream), react them, and then output the reaction products.

For my first attempt, I have used the Fixed Conversion Reactor, and defined a property pack, which I call 'Moist Air'. Right now, this includes standard air molecules (N2, O2, Ar, CO2, Ne, Kr, N2O), plus methane plus water. This allows me to define an air stream (with only trace methane), and a Natural Gas fuel stream (methane with traces of N2, etc.), adjust their flow rates, temperatures and pressures with various Unit Operations, mix them and send them to the Reactor. The products of combustion are then treated by my downstream process, which I have nicely configured and converging.

Now I would like to try some other fuels (for example distillates), but I think it will be a little cumbersome to edit my 'moist air' property pack to include an alcohol (for example), since for the purposes of my studies I can ignore any unburned hydrocarbon exiting the burner.

Is there a reactor already in COCO that can do this?
If not is there a preferred approach to solving this kind of problem with the available Unit Operations?
Or is it recomended that I build my own Burner Unit Operation in Excel or some other external environment?

Thanks.

One option that comes to mind is to use two property packages, one with and one without the additional compounds. For the reactor feed & product you can use the augmented property package. You can convert from and to the extended compound slate using a stream converter unit. This way the rest of the flowsheet does not have to deal with the remaining compounds.

Or did I misunderstand your question?

wmconlon wrote: Is there a recommended reactor that can take a multiple input streams...

For the multiple input streams you can use a mixer before the reactor. You can combine the mixer, stream converters and reactor into a unit operation that is in fact an embedded COFE flowsheet.

Thanks for the tips.

The embedding option seems especially useful and flexible. I will try that.