Visual environment for editing and solving flowsheets : design and implementation of a visual environment for editing and solving flowsheets to produce heat and material balances for urea plant designs

Urea is an organic compound that is used widely as a fertilizer to increase the crop size and the yield. Urea is produced from ammonia and carbon dioxide in urea plants. Stamicarbon’s main activity is designing and licensing urea plants. An important activity of the process engineers at Stamicarbon consists of the design of the flowsheet and the calculation of the solution of the heat and material balances for the urea plant. Improving the productivity of the process engineers and shortening the learning curve of the new process engineers is of great importance to Stamicarbon. Stamicarbon’s vision is to the change the flowsheet design from text-based to graphics-based. This project aimed to implement a graphics-based solution that would increase the comprehension of the structure and the state of the flow-sheet design. This project also aimed to enable the process engineers to visually merge plant sections that could be reused in flowsheet designs. Finally, a part of this project involved the integration of the graphics-based editor and the flowsheet solver into one tool. The three major design criteria are usability, navigability, and extensibility. The main tools used for the implementation of this project are the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and the Eclipse Sirius. The domain model is designed with EMF. The visual representations are created with Eclipse Sirius. The architecture of the system is plug-in based. The final prototype is deployed as an RCP outside the Eclipse IDE.