22-09-2014

ProSim announces the launch of Simulis Pinch

For the majority of industrial sites, energy is the major cost of operations after the raw materials, so improving the energy efficiency of processes represents a major objective. In this context, ProSim, a leading European process simulation and optimization software provider, announces the launch of a new tool dedicated to improving energy efficiency: Simulis Pinch. This software can generate significant gains with a very short return on investment (at most a few months).

Dedicated to the diagnosis and energy integration of the processes, Simulis Pinch integrates the general principles of the Pinch method and is applicable to any industrial process where utilities energy is consumed for heating or cooling the process fluids. Based on Pinch Technology, Simulis Pinch enables you to quickly find the most efficient configuration for the process, allowing the best compromise between investments and operating cost, to reach the objective of energy consumption reduction.

Simulis Pinch first allows you to do the energy diagnosis of a process.  The diagnosis quickly indicates whether a better energy integration will significantly reduce the energy consumption of the industrial site or if the current energy integration is already efficient. So the engineer understands, and can explain to management, why resources and time should be dedicated to improving the energy integration of the industrial site. The engineer can thus conduct a complete preliminary analysis on energy efficiency and verify that the utilities production on site meets the real needs of the process. 

Then the huge advantage of Simulis Pinch is the energy integration of the process. The energy integration concept refers to the optimal synthesis of a heat exchanger network that achieves maximum energy recovery, i.e. to reach the process operating point with the minimum of energy required by coupling the hot fluids (energy givers) and the cold fluids (energy consumers).Simulis Pinch has a pragmatic approach : the objective is to ensure, in a very short time,  to propose various heat exchanger network solutions that meet the real constraints of the industrial site (fluids compatibility, distance,…).  The computational speed and built-in intelligence of Simulis Pinch shows the energy integration solutions due to the classical approach and also clearly identifies which ones are impractical, based on criteria that you specify.

Compared to the "manual" approach (limited to only very few streams and tedious when testing different scenarios) and mathematical approaches (limited by very lengthy calculations required for real industrial processes with many streams, leading most of the time to unrealistic solutions in terms of couplings and unproductive when the cost of units are very different depending on the couplings), the unique approach of Simulis Pinch makes it thus a particularly effective tool.

Simulis Pinch is a standalone product, available for use directly in Microsoft Excel. It can also be used with ProSimPlus and then becomes particularly powerful for improving the energy efficiency of complex processes.