الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
It goes without saying that, process simulation has wide applications in the oil and gas industry. It has been utilized in research, development, performance monitoring and design from upstream facilities through production, transportation, treatment, cryogenic processing to refining and chemical processes. On the academic scale, it has been introduced in many universities and institutes in introductory and advances chemical and petroleum engineering courses. The field of process simulation is now dominated by software from few commercial vendors. While most chemical and petroleum companies can develop their own process simulation models or cases utilizing such software, but they are still relying on technical support services provided from software vendors which sometimes, including license renewal fees, become untenable (at the scale of tens of thousands of US dollars per year). Also, respecting the copyrights prohibits cracking of such software in order to increase the number of available licenses within a particular organization and add extra budgetary items on such companies. Furthermore, process simulator algorithms are hidden (built-in) and are not available to a user who is interested to follow step-by-step calculation in order to study the effect of individual variables or parameters or know exactly which step in the calculation is time-consuming or even the number of iterations required to reach the final solution (for statistical purposes) executed on a single unit operation or the whole system. In addition to the aforementioned, any process simulator will do computations exactly as instructed, but it is unable to determine whether the result obtained is meaningful or not. That is the job of the engineer. All of these financial and technical issues represent a great challenge for such chemical and petroleum companies. The aim of this study is to help engineers to explore fundamentals, concepts and criteria of the most important calculations that are carried-out by process simulators through clear understanding and firm grasp of the basic principles of thermodynamics by developing an educational, in-house, open-source mathematical model capable of calculating the majority of the important thermodynamic, physical, transport, and volumetric properties which can be obtained from any trustful process simulator. The model algorithms utilize Peng-Robinson Equation-of-State and demonstrates its wide applications in performing many calculations such as; equilibrium flash in two- or three-phase systems predicting their thermodynamic properties, true critical point, determination of cricondentherm / cricondenbar conditions and plotting the phase envelope of multicomponent mixtures. Two case studies have been selected to test the capabilities of the developed model algorithms due to their importance in the oil and gas industry; a three-phase separator and construction of a phase envelope for a multicomponent system. Validation of the model results against those obtained from Aspen Hysys indicated an excellent agreement.