BEST: Biochemical Engineering Simulation Technology

The idea of developing a process simulator that can describe biochemical engineering (a relatively new technology area) was formulated at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) during the late 1980s. The initial plan was to build a consortium of industrial and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) partners to enhance a commercial simulator with biochemical unit operations. DOE supported thiseffort; however, before the consortium was established, the process simulator industry changed considerably. Work on the first phase of implementing various fermentation reactors into the chemical process simulator, ASPEN/SP-BEST, is complete. This report will focus on those developments. Simulation Sciences, Inc. (SimSci) no longer supports ASPEN/SP, and Aspen Technology, Inc. (AspenTech) hasdeveloped an add-on to its ASPEN PLUS (also called BioProcess Simulator [BPS]). This report will also explain the similarities and differences between BEST and BPS. ASPEN, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for DOE in the late 1970s, is still the state-of-the-art chemical process simulator. It was selected as the only simulator with the potential to be easily expanded intothe biochemical area. ASPEN/SP, commercially sold by SimSci, was selected for the BEST work. SimSci completed work on batch, fed-batch, and continuous fermentation reactors in 1993, just as it announced it would no longer commercially support the complete ASPEN/SP product. BEST was left without a basic support program. Luckily, during this same time frame, AspenTech was developing a biochemicalsimulator with its version of ASPEN (ASPEN PLUS), which incorporates most BEST concepts. The future of BEST will involve developing physical property data and models appropriate to biochemical systems that are necessary for good biochemical process design.