The COCO Simulator is a free-of-charge, non-commercial, graphical, modular and CAPE-OPEN compliant, steady-state, sequential simulation process modeling environment. It was originally intended as a test environment for CAPE-OPEN modeling tools but now provides free chemical process simulation for students. It is an open flowsheet[1] [2] modeling environment allowing anyone to add new unit operations[3] or thermodynamics packages.
The COCO Simulator uses a graphical representation, the Process Flow Diagram (PFD), for defining the process to be simulated. Clicking on a unit operation with the mouse allows the user to edit the unit operation parameters it defines via the CAPE-OPEN standard or to open the unit operation's own user interface, when available. This interoperability of process modeling software was enabled by the advent of the CAPE-OPEN standard. COCO thermodynamic library "TEA" and its chemical compound data bank are based on ChemSep [4] LITE, a free equilibrium column simulator for distillation columns and liquid-liquid extractors. COCO's thermodynamic library exports more than 100 property calculation methods with their analytical or numerical derivatives. COCO includes a LITE version of COSMOtherm, an activity coefficient model based on Ab initio quantum chemistry methods. The simulator entails a set of unit-operations such as stream splitters/mixers, heat-exchangers, compressors, pumps and reactors. COCO features a reaction numerics package to power its simple conversion, equilibrium, CSTR, Gibbs minimization and plug flow reactor models.