The primary goal of the integration is to combine high-fidelity equipment modeling with plant-wide process modeling to enable rapid assessment of innovative new plants involving unique equipment (e.g. fuel cells, gasifiers, complex reactors). The interface enables a comprehensive assessment of how all equipment items work together in a process by allowing detailed fluid mechanics models to plug into the overall flowsheet.

Fluent Inc. worked closely with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in West Virginia under a US Department of Energy cooperative agreement to develop and demonstrate this integrated piece of software. The software is now available commercially. “This Award is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between NETL, ALSTOM Power Plant Laboratories, Aspen Technology Inc, West Virginia University and Fluent Inc.,” says Dr. Madhava Syamlal of Fluent, the project leader, “We believe that it paves the way for more accurate simulations of complex process / power plants as hardware and software technologies grow ever more powerful in the next 10 years.”

The R&D 100 Awards, hosted by R&D Magazine, have been running for over 40 years. The aim of the Awards is to select the 100 most technologically significant new products introduced into the marketplace during the year from the many nominations received from around the world. Previous winners of the R&D 100 Award have included Polacolor Film (1963), the Halogen Lamp (1974), the Fax Machine (1975), Liquid Crystal Displays (1980), the Nicoderm Antismoking Patch (1992) and Lab on a Chip technologies (1996) to name a few. An independent judging panel of consultants and academics along with the editor of the magazine chose the winning entries. Details of this year’s winners were revealed in the September edition of the magazine. An Awards ceremony in Chicago is set to follow on October 14th.