Reaction packages and reaction package templates

A Reaction Package is a collection of chemical compounds and reaction data, specific to a chemical engineering application. CORN differentiates between instances of Reaction Packages and Reaction Package Templates.

Reaction package templates

Reaction package templates are configurations for a reaction package; you can use a reaction package template to instantiate a reaction package.

You can configure the Reaction package templates for CORN from within COCO (by using the Edit Templates button, that is available when choosing Edit after selecting CORN in the Add Reaction Package window), or by using the external configuration utility 'configureCORN.exe'.

To create a copy of an existing reaction package template, first create a new one, and then use the Load button to restore it from an existing one.

Reaction package templates are stored in the data file CORNconfig.dat, located in [Application Data]\COCO\data. Delete the user copy of CORNconfig.dat to revert to the default copy.

Reaction packages

Once you have created a reaction package template, you can use it by adding a reaction package to a simulation. At this point you will be asked what reaction package template to use for your simulation.

Some simulation environments, like COCO, will allow you to edit the content of a reaction package. In the case of CORN, this does not reflect on the reaction package templates. Also, changes made to the reaction package template do not reflect on instantiated reaction packages.

When editing a reaction package, you can however reload the reaction package from a reaction package template. To do so, click the Restore button in the reaction package editing window. Vice versa, you can also save the content of the current reaction package to a reaction package template. For this, use the Store button when editing the reaction package.

Some simulation environments do not allow you to edit a reaction package. In this case, it is likely that the content of a reaction package is also not stored (using the CAPE-OPEN defined persistence interface).

For this scenario, it is likely that each time you load your document, the reaction package is reloaded from a template that has the same name (the name of the template that was originally used for the document). In order to make changes to the document's reaction package, you will therefore need to close the document, use the ConfigureCORN.exe utility to change the corresponding reaction package template, and reload your document.

Documents that do not support editing and storing reaction packages depend on information in the reaction package template data file "CORNconfig.dat". Therefore, when transporting such a simulation document between computers, make sure the "CORNconfig.data" files for the current user are the same.

Configuration

On the general page of the reaction package configuration dialog, you can specify a name and a description for the reaction package. You can also specify which thermodynamic CAPE-OPEN standard version should be used for all property calls. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 are currently supported.