The U.S. Department of Energy’s Vision 21 program is supporting development of pollution-free power plants of tomorrow that could be fueled by various combinations of coal, natural gas, bio-mass, or even the discarded wastes of cities. These new power plants will generate electricity at unprecedented efficiencies, perhaps twice those of today’s plants and they will be capable of producing multiple products – fuels, chemicals, and process heat, along with electricity.

A visual concept of a Vision 21 Plant of the Future on Roosevelt Island, NYC, in the year 2020

Fluent Inc., along with Aspen Technology, Alstom Power, Intergraph, and West Virginia University, will embark on a project to develop advanced software tools for designing Vision 21 plants, with a $1.5 million award coming from the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE has identified the need for “an integrated suite of codes that includes submodels for components and subsystems, dynamic response and process control, and visualization capabilities” called the “virtual demonstration.” Fluent and partners plan to develop interfaces between FLUENT and AspenTech’s flow sheet model AspenPlus. This will facilitate the usage of CFD models within flow sheet models.

The team also plans to demonstrate the ability of the integrated software to accept other models, by using, for example, certain proprietary models developed by Alstom Power. The planned software integration will enable designers to build detailed models of entire plants using information from a hierarchy of models. Upon completion of this project, a general methodology and open standards for the integration of equipment-level models with flow sheet models will emerge.

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