The AixCAPE ShortCut unit is not available to organizations outside the AixCAPE membership. CO-LaN has access to it because it was tested in various PMEs. Anyhow it does not work exactly as the shortcut unit you find in most libraries of unit operations. It functions mostly in verification rather than in design mode.
The Fenske-Underwood-Gilliland methods usually implemented in a shortcut calculation are not that complicated. They rely on the kvalues which are often available from a Property Package or which can be inferred from other properties. You may want to have a look implementing these methods in Excel or Scilab. That way you may make the Unit Operation a CAPE-OPEN Unit Operation. Input parameters for such a Unit Operation are just a few, like a light compound, a heavy compound for which you are stating the splitting you want to achieve. Pressure needs to be also a parameter since the column may operate at a different pressure than the feed pressure.
Mind that you may want to have a look at the source code of the shortcut unit available in DWSIM which is open source. The unit is not CAPE-OPEN compliant.
jasper wrote:There is no CAPE-OPEN based shortcut method that comes with COCO. However, as COCO can use any CAPE-OPEN compliant unit operations, third party shortcut methods that are CAPE-OPEN compliant can be used.
AIXCape presented such a method back in 2006:
http://www.colan.org/News/Y06/AixCAPE_ACHEMA06.pdf; I am not sure whether or not this is publicly available.
There is also of course the possibility of implementing the shortcut method yourself as a CAPE-OPEN unit operation. In this way you cannot use it only in COCO, but also in many other simulation environments (including Aspen Plus).