A Comsol Interface to Cape-Open Compliant Physical and Thermodynamic Property Packages

COMSOL version 3.5 features a CAPE-OPEN thermodynamic and physical properties interface, enabling COMSOL products to access property calculations from CAPE-OPEN compliant physical property packages.

Two reactor models are presented to exemplify the use of the new interface. The first model treats a steady-state membrane reactor simulated under plug-flow conditions. The second model deals with a three-dimensional reactor where fluid flow, temperature, and composition are simulated for time and space dependency.

The interface supports both CAPE-OPEN Thermo 1.1 and CAPE-OPEN Thermo 1.0 standards. External property packages are accessed through COMSOL Script®, allowing for compound constant import, single-phase, two-phase, pressure-dependent, and temperature-dependent property calculations, as well as for equilibrium computations. Such external calculations can subsequently be directly imported to the graphical user interfaces of COMSOL Multiphysics® and COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab®.