Development of an open-source tool for equation-oriented process simulation in Python computational language

Nowadays, the process modeling and simulation exhibit notable importance, allowing the experimentation between different process designs and control configurations, as well as quality assurance and process optimization studies. In this sense, the equation-oriented approach, in which all the equations describing each subprocess are compiled into a single equation set, stands out as an advantageous approach. The current work focuses on the discussion of a developed tool, SLOTH, that is open- source and developed in Python computational language. The tool was applied in three different cases of study of industrial relevance, and the results obtained shown that the tool was able to solve the problems, obtaining values coherent with those presented in the literature, although some tasks required high computational times. Those aspects will be optimized in future versions of the tool, which is built collaboratively through the open-source nature of the project.

Keywords: Modeling, Simulation, Equation-oriented simulation, Python, open-source.