Ports and Streams

The Excel unit operation has material feed and product ports. The feed port properties will be set for you by the unit operation. You must specify the product properties using Excel formulas.

Feed ports

The feed ports are specified on the feeds sheet. By default, a single feed port is configured. You can add and remove ports simply by inserting new rows in the ports table. Make sure that there are no empty lines between ports, and that the header rows (rows 1 and 2) remain unmodified. You can rename a port simply by changing the name in the feeds sheet.

Once you have configured your ports, close Excel, connect the feed ports, and edit the unit again. At this point, the feeds (and products) sheet will show the chemical compounds that are present on the streams connected to the feeds. All streams connected to the unit operation must have the same compounds on it.

If you have specified the conditions of the streams connected to the feed ports, they will also appear on the feeds page. All units of measure are in SI; temperature is in Kelvin, pressure in Pascal, flow in mol / s and compositions are in mole fractions.

To add a feed port, you can select Add Feed from the Unit Operation ribbon.

Product ports

The product ports are defined on the products sheet. The products sheet has the same format as the feeds sheet. You will need to enter Excel formulas to specify each of the product streams. Total flow and composition need to always be calculated. In addition, two out of three of pressure, temperature and enthalpy need to be calculated for each product in order for the unit operation to calculate the thermodynamic equilibrium.

As with the feeds, you can add and remove products simply by adding product names to the table. Make sure there are no empty lines in between the products and that header rows 1 and 2 do not get modified.

To add a product port, you can also select Add Product from the Unit Operation ribbon.

It is advised to do all complex calculations on a different sheet, e.g. the calculations sheet.