What is COCO?

COCO (CAPE-OPEN to CAPE-OPEN) is a free-of-charge CAPE-OPEN compliant steady-state simulation environment consisting of the following components:

COFE - the CAPE-OPEN Flowsheet Environment is an intuitive graphical user interface to chemical flowsheeting. COFE has sequential solution algorithm using automatic tear streams. COFE displays properties of streams, deals with unit-conversion and provides plotting facilities.
COFE flowsheets can be used as CAPE-OPEN unit operations; so you can use COFE Flowsheets as unit operation inside COFE (flowsheets in flowsheets) or inside other simulators.

TEA - COCO's Thermodynamics for Engineering Applications, is based on the code of the thermodynamic library of ChemSep and includes a data bank of over 550 commonly used chemicals. The package exhibits more than 100 property calculation methods with their analytical or numerical derivatives.

COUSCOUS - the CAPE-OPEN Unit-operations Simple package is shipped with COCO. It contains a splitter, a mixer, heat exchangers, pumps and reactors amongst other unit operations. ChemSep-LITE, a limited version of ChemSep with a maximum of 40 compounds and 300 stages, can serve as an equilibrium distillation unit operation in COCO. A full version of the equilibrium and non-equilibrium column simulator can be obtained at http://www.chemsep.com/. ChemSep-LITE is included in the COCO installation.

CORN - the CAPE-OPEN Reaction Numerics package that comes with COCO facilitates specifying any kind of kinetic or equilibrium reaction. Simple reactor units, like conversion reactors, CSTRs and plug flow reactors that can use the CORN package come with the COUSCOUS package.

COCO Utilities and add-ins:

The following utilities and add-ins are part of the COCO distribution:

Water - a CAPE-OPEN version 1.1 stand-alone property package for calculation of properties of water and steam, based on the IAPWS-97 industrial standard. Source code and its license are available from here.

CORK - the CAPE-OPEN Registry Kit. Inspection of CAPE-OPEN registry CAT-IDs and component registration.

OATS - the Out-of-proc Application Thermo Server. Allows for running inproc 32-bit physical property packages from an out-of-proc server, which in turn can be used in 64-bit client applications. Also includes extensive logging of CAPE-OPEN communication between simulation environment and client models. Includes COULIS, the CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation Logger.

COFE.xlt - a Microsoft Excel^TM spread-sheet template designed to include a COFE document in an Excel workbook. This allows for accessing stream and unit operation data of a flowsheet, as well as performing thermodynamic and physical property calculations in Excel.

JUIcE - Just a Unit-operation Icon Editor. For creation and maintenance of unit operation icons used with COFE.

TERNYP - TERNarY Plugin. Creation of phase diagrams, property plots and residue curves of ternary systems.

ConfigureTEA - a utility application to configure and maintain TEA property packages.

ConfigureCORN - a utility application to configure and maintain CORN reaction packages.

Online help - extensive online documentation; also available from here.

COFEStand - Stand-alone command line utility for solving COFE flowsheets.

CUP - COCO UPdate. Performs online updates for all packages included in COCO.

System requirements: Windows XP or higher.

Screen shots

COFE is a graphical flowsheeting environment. All components (unit operations, thermodynamics and reactions) are imported from CAPE-OPEN models. Warnings and errors as well as additional information are logged to the output under each document window.

Streams in COFE: The stream dialog displays an arbitrary number of streams. Composition, temperature, pressure or phase fraction can be specified for each stream. Any input will automatically cause a flash calculation and an update of the properties. COCO also supplies unit conversion.

TEA is our CAPE-OPEN compliant thermodynamic property package. TEA is based on the thermodynamic library of ChemSep. The property data bank contains of over 150 commonly used chemicals. The package exhibits more than 100 property calculation routines with their analytical or numerical derivatives.

COUSCOUS is our CAPE-OPEN compliant set of unit operations. It includes simple basic unit operations for setting up a flowsheet, but also unit operations for testing and debugging purposes.

CORN is our CAPE-OPEN compliant reaction package; it makes it possible to specify a set of arbitrary reactions. A string parser facilitates entering expressions for reaction rates, equilibrium constants and heats of reaction.

OATS provides extensive logging of communication between CAPE-OPEN software components. Log files (*.olg) are in XML format, and a viewer presents the function calls as a tree, with immediate access to logged warnings and errors for quick trouble-shooting. OATS is indispensable in debugging CAPE-OPEN development.

TERNYP creates property plots, phase envelopes, residue curves and residue curve maps for systems of three components. Shown here is a residue curve map with bubble point temperature along the residue curves, that can be rotated in 3 dimensions.

More screen shots...

CAPE-OPEN award 2006

COCO has been awarded the CO-LaN CAPE-OPEN award for the year 2006 for advances in CAPE-OPEN development. For a larger image of the award itself, click on the image below.

Download COCO

Download COCO from our Download Page.