July 18, 2017 conference call

[colancto]

The Thermo SIG held a conference call on July 18, 2017. Sergej BLAGOV (BASF SE), Jasper van BATEN (AmsterCHEM) and Mark STIJNMAN (Shell Global Solutions) attended the meeting with me.

On the agenda was to figure out the pros and cons of handling the plurality of Compound Slates with or without Delegate Material Objects. It seems to boil down to accepting automatic conversions between compound slates or not accepting such an automatic procedure.
Compound Slates provide the different representations of a mixture: the basic example being the difference between an apparent compound approach and a true compound approach. As permitted by CAPE-OPEN, there are a number of software components involved around different Compound Slates. The Material Object, which is owned by the Process Modelling Environment, is populated in terms of composition, phase split with respect to a specific Compound Slate. Plus it carries temperature and pressure of the mixture. Who is populating the Material Object? Among the possibilities, there is a Property Package when calculating the phase and presumably reactive equilibrium at specified conditions. The Property Package may carry its calculations using a different Compound Slate than the one used by the Material Object. Typically the Property Package may prefer to carry calculations using a true compound approach while the Material Object will store information using an apparent compound approach. The Property Package will have to convert the apparent compound representation as stored on the Material Object into a true compound approach to be manipulated within the Property Package. When the calculation within the Property Package is finished, the Property Package needs to store back the results on the Material Object, presumably using an apparent compound approach, so with another conversion involved.
Defining Delegate Material Objects, which behave as Material Objects but differ from the original Material Object by the Compound Slate used to represent the mixture, while sharing the same state, is a way to keep the different representations of a mixture in parallel and synchronized. This consistency is automatically ensured by the PME even if the operations needed to keep that consistency rely on the Property Package. IS it necessary to introduce such a concept which is very close to a Material Object apart from small differences?
The different scenarii discussed during the meeting did not permit to reach a conclusive position.