(127d) The Art of Modeling in Process Systems Engineering

The first part of the talk focuses on my experience as a member of the development team of ASCEND IV. I will provide my individual view about all the effort and the leadership of Professor Art Westerberg for designing and implementing an efficient user-friendly environment for the creation and solving of complex engineering models.  I will describe my opinion as a student, as a member of the development team and as a user of the system.

Then, the second part is concerned with the use of fractional calculus as an emerging modeling tool in process systems engineering. We will intend to demonstrate that the dynamics of some systems are described more accurately by using fractional order derivatives. In particular, we show that the kinetics of some reactive systems displaying atypical behavior, such as some biological processes, can be represented by fractional order differential equations (FDE). A simple case-study including fractional kinetics is used to describe the mathematical issues involved and the effects of the fractional order derivatives in the model formulation.