CHEMCAD

Chemcad is software specially dedicated to the chemical engineers for the process simulation. While it might be difficult for the beginners to understand the interface, once you get soaked in you can make a really good use of it. Chemcad comes up with numbers of features like equipment sizing, equipment design and process economics as well. Also it includes thermophysical calculations. With all those features, it definitely helps engineers from designing a equipment to designing the whole plant as well as performing other calculations too. One might say that other application are better than this, I would definitely argue with that for the fact that it is great value for money

As mentioned earlier, this software might be quite difficult at the beginning because the interface is confusing but there are lots of tutorials and webinars held that will help you to learn. Furthermore, in case of any errors or unexpected results, you have to sort out for the problems manually as the program won’t do itself.

This software works well for chemical process modeling, and was used at my university to teach design to senior design. It had many features that worked well for the course, and basically had everything necessary for us to complete our design project and learn what we needed to. I can definitely see uses in industry as this project gave us a good background on what we could expect with process engineering or process design roles.

It can be difficult to learn, and some people fell behind throughout the semester. Unfortunately, there may not be much that can be done about this. In fact, there are a lot of tutorials and helpful advice on the website, and even some workshops. The toughness just comes from the rigor from chemical engineering in the first place. Some may argue that alternative chemical process design software may be better, but it really is not much better than this in my opinion.