UB Virtual Reality Laboratory

COLD BOX DESIGN - USE OF OPTIMIZATION AND VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES TO FIND AN OPTIMAL LAYOUT FOR AN AIR SEPARATION PLANT COLD BOX

Goal
Create an engineering software environment for conceptual design that allows the generation of an entire plant design along with an accurate cost estimate. Use of visualization, coupled with advanced design and optimization methodologies will help to rapidly investigate competing plant designs.

Abstract

The Praxair project involves the development of a software environment that will help design an entire plant layout along with its cost estimate. The software is composed of two modules viz. the Optimization Engine or Optimizer and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) or Visualizer. The Optimizer comes up with various layouts (designs) along with a cost estimate. It generates an XML file/stream of the layout which is passed on to the Visualizer which uses this data to generate a graphical representation of the optimized design. OpenGL forms the front end of the Visualizer where we can see the complete plant layout (see Fig.) whereas all the data reading and interpretation is done in the backend which is a C++ program. As we have to manipulate XML data from the program, the Xerces C++, a validating XML parser written in a portable subset of C++, is used.