Product Incorporating NIST Expert System Wins R&D 100 Award

Commercial process-design software that incorporates NIST's thermophysical and thermochemical property data sets will receive a 2009 R&D 100 award, R&D Magazine has announced. The annual award recognizes the 100 most technologically significant products introduced during the past year.

The award recognizes Aspen Plus® 2006.5 with NIST ThermoData Engine (TDE), a process simulator that provides new tools to significantly increase the number and variety of chemical components that may be considered by the process design engineer, while dramatically reducing the time required for compilation and critical evaluation of component properties. The product is marketed by Aspen Technology Inc. of Burlington, Mass., and is used in a range of industries: oil & gas, petroleum refining, chemicals, power, pharmaceuticals, metal & mining, for the design and optimization of processes.

The NIST ThermoData Engine combines a sophisticated expert system with a large electronic database to provide critically evaluated property data for a wide range of organic compounds on demand, helping engineers to rapidly develop accurate, high-fidelity chemical process models. (See "New Web-based System Leads to Better, More Timely Data.")

Six NIST personnel worked on the cooperative project with Aspen Tech, including Thermodynamics Research Center group leader Michael Frenkel, chemist Robert Chirico, physicist Chris Muzny, chemical engineer Eric Lemmon, physicist Andrei Kazakov, and NIST associate Vladimir Diky. NIST participates in such projects to help assure that U.S. industry has access to accurate and reliable data and predictive models to determine the chemical and physical properties of materials and processes.

The awards will be presented on Nov. 12, 2009, in Orlando, Fla.