Overview
This site provides an introduction to navigating and troubleshooting Aspen Plus, a popular chemical engineering process simulator. I will be using Aspen Plus V10 in this tutorial.
This tutorial is not extensive but meant to be an introduction, meaning I will skip over features I feel are not as important.
The layout of this site will roughly follow how I was taught Aspen in university, so it is possible that, depending on your purpose of using this site, some information might be less useful than others. Thankfully, many of Aspen’s features do not require a full understanding of Aspen to use correctly. Therefore, I encourage you to skip around the navigation to find what you need.
This tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of chemical engineering processes, but this background isn’t absolutely necessary. The tutorial also assumes that you have already installed Aspen. If you are a UT Austin student, our IT department has an excellent tutorial.
What is Aspen?
Aspen is a process simulation software for chemical processes. Aspen is one of the most widely used simulation software in the chemical engineering industry, making learning it an extremely valuable resource.
Aspen will take any chemical plant or model and solve the following relationships:
- Mass and energy balances
- Chemical and phase equilibrium
- Reaction kinetics
Aspen can display these results in the form of tables and graphs which you can customize for your particular project.
Aspen also has the functionality to analyze the following components:
- Safety
- Energy Use
- Economics/Cost
However, these functionalities are secondary to the software’s main use and so are not going to be covered in this tutorial.
Resources
Aspen can be difficult at times, especially with more complex processes or multiple units calculating simultaneously. In these cases, all inputs must be feasible values or Aspen will throw errors. Sometimes, even if values are feasible, Aspen will still not converge, and the reason why it isn’t working is not always clear. However, the worst part is that resources for Aspen are generally sparse.
If you ever get stuck, try these resources:
- Check out the troubleshooting page on this site.
- Navigate to the Aspen tab that is throwing an error and navigate to Resources → Help at the top menu.
- Try YouTube when googling errors - there are generally more resources there than other places. LearnChemE is an excellent resource.
First Launching Aspen
If you are launching Aspen for the first time, see First Launching Aspen.