CloudPF® User manual

This document is the user’s manual for CloudPF®. It is also available in Italian, French and German.

CloudPF® (Cloud Process Flowsheeting) is a toolkit to publish the process models built with LIBPF® (the LIBrary for Process Flowsheeting) as web apps for cloud-based process simulation.

With CloudPF® you can easily create simple-to-use, customized web applications, that make process models more accessible so that non-experts can prioritize and optimize decisions in the proposal and design phases of new plants.

CloudPF® can be tested on simevo SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). CloudPF® is presented below in order to show its features. Here the Electrolysis demo (Elysim) was taken as an example, Elysim is a variant of CloudPF® to demonstrate the cloud-based simulation of electrolysis systems for H₂ production. The other demos are available here.

Homepage

The homepage (Cases list) looks like this:

cloudpf homepage

Here you can create new cases or view those already created. Clicking on the button “New case” opens a modal where is possible to configure the plant and set certain presets (as set forth by the model developer):

cloudpf new case

Case detail page

Clicking on the case name in the case list leads to the detail page where you can see all the information on the case.

Here there are some tabs that you can choose to see different aspect of the plant.

The most useful and significant one is the “PFD” (Process Flowsheet Diagram) tab:

cloudpf pfd

From here you can select the units and streams by clicking on the different parts of the flowsheet:

cloudpf pfd detail

An alternative way of browsing units and streams is via the tree view panel on the left side.

By clicking on “Inputs” tab you can change different variables of the currently selected unit or stream:

cloudpf inputs

Once all the values have been changed (optionally switching units of measurement) the case must be recalculated (button with the Pocket Calculator icon), after that the new results will be available on the “Outputs” tabs:

cloudpf outputs

Certain models also offer graphical display of results such as Pie charts, Bar charts and Sankey diagrams.

About page

The About page provides an opportunity to explore in detail the demo, explaining the process involved and what CloudPF® can do in practice:

cloudpf about

The Support link opens in another browser tab the LIBPF® / CloudPF® support community https://support.libpf.com right at the CloudPF cloud-based simulation category.

This is an open forum where users help and provide support to each other on a voluntary basis; it runs Discourse, the open-source discussion platform software system.

To post your questions and answers you must register with your email address or sign in with your Google or Github accounts.