Process Simulation and Control (PSIC) is a easy-to-use and a user-friendly Excel add-in application for both studying process dynamics and designing simple control systems, all through modeling and simulation in the time domain. It is an interactive tool for education using a well-known spreadsheet environment that has been designed to help students understand the behavior of basic chemical engineering systems and basic principles of feedback control, without the need to program in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or to understand Laplace transformation. PSIC allows students to build dynamic simulation models of liquid storage systems, heat or mass transfer processes, chemical and biochemical reactors, and many more systems. PSIC can simulate systems consisting of up to ten ordinary differential equations (ODEs) of the first order, with up to twenty-five quantities. Optionally, simulation models can be connected to a feedback proportional-interal-dervative (PID) controller into a configurable regulatory loop.
7.5
The PSIC requires Excel 2007+ for Win, and enabled macros. Excel for Mac is not supported. Activate the add-in using the Add-ins dialog box.
The usage of PSIC is illustrated in the simulation and control of an electrically heated water heater in the file heater.xlsx.
- User Guide
- Nachtigalova I, Finkeova J, Krbcova Z, Souskova H. A spreadsheet‐based tool for education of chemical process simulation and control fundamentals. Comput Appl Eng Educ. 2020; 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22271
PSIC is being developed at the Deparment of Mathematics, Informatics and Cybernetics, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague. See AUTHORS
This software is licensed under a Mozilla Public License 2.0.