The material that is present during the physico-chemical transformations of your process is represented in SuperPro Designer by Pure Components and Stock Mixtures; entities that sometimes are collectively referred to as ingredients. Ingredients are primarily used to characterize (as amount and composition) the flow of all streams and equipment content of equipment with mass-holding capacity in a process simulation. Stock mixtures in particular are used mostly to expedite initialization of feed streams. They come very handy when certain raw materials (e.g., buffers) are always consumed by the process as a combination of pure components in a known composition. Sometimes ingredients are also consumed directly by an operation as special agents (without appearing on a stream). For example: a Gas-Sweep operation uses a material of choice as a sweeping agent; a CIP operation employs some material as cleaning agent, etc. There are many properties that describe each component (see Pure Component Properties) and few that describe each mixture (see Stock Mixture Properties). In order to facilitate the reuse of components and mixtures in several process simulations, SuperPro Designer comes equipped with a component and a mixture databank. All the contents of the component and mixture databank are kept in the ‘SuperPro (User)’ database that comes pre-loaded with about 1,200 components and 50 mixtures. The pre-loaded content of the ‘SuperPro’ database is maintained and updated periodically (from major release to major release) by our staff. The actual members of the component and mixture databank can be viewed, edited, extended and even deleted (if any member is no longer needed) by the users. SuperPro Designer also supports the ‘DIPPR’ pure component database in its relational database format (as developed and maintained at Brigham Young University) and the PPDS (Pure Component and Binary Interaction Parameter database from TÜV SÜD). For more information on the component and mixture databanks, see Pure Components Databank and Databank of Stock Mixtures.
For users interested in modeling non-ideal mixtures and include rigorous vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) models in their simulations, binary component coefficients are also required, see Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium Modeling. SuperPro Designer comes with a pair of databanks for binary coefficients as well (see Binary Coefficients Databank).
In order to introduce a component or mixture into your process simulation, you must register it first (see Pure Component Registration and Stock Mixture Registration).