Servitized Cloud-Based Simulation of Evaporation Plants: Model-Based Design Tools Supporting Circular Bioeconomy

Continuous industrial processes will play a key role for the sustainable transition worldwide. Different flows of matter and energy must be recovered through these systems and integrated in a Circular Economy fashion. To foster in such a virtuous trend the involvement of companies, mostly SMEs (often lacking critical assets, funds, technologies or knowledge), the continuous processes should be packaged, servitized and marketed as plants-as-a-service. Model-based design (MBD) tools can provide test before invest and decision support in the feasibility and procurement phases, as well as optimization and self-diagnosing during operation, in a cyber-physical system (CPS) setting. To ease their provision, a cloud-based collaboration platform, enabling providers to deploy tools in a sandbox, has been developed by the HUBCAP project. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the web application tool built for the evaporation process simulation, validated against real-world performance data for the reference evaporation plant, and deployed to the HUBCAP platform. To structure it, data collection, filtration, processing, and reporting have been performed on the full-scale pilot plant (the EVAPOSIM experiment), a triple-effect evaporator operating in counterflow and vacuum condition. To explore the sustainability of their plant, companies can use this MBD tool through the sandbox of the HUBCAP platform under a servitized (use- or result-oriented) business model (software as a service).