Process plant design is the software that engineers use to design a refinery or a chemical plant on a screen, before it is built. A process plant is a factory that changes materials by heating, mixing, separating or reacting them, instead of assembling parts. The design has to settle how materials move through the plant, and where every pipe and vessel goes.
The zone has two products, and the work passes from one to the other. Chemical process simulation works out how the materials will move, heat and react, and so how big each vessel must be. Plant design software then places those vessels, the pipes between them and the steel structures in 3D.
A plant takes years to build and costs thousands of crores of rupees, so a mistake found on site is very expensive. A plant also has thousands of pipes, valves and instruments, and many contractors work on it at the same time. Software gives all of them one shared design. In India, large plants of this kind stand in places such as Jamnagar, Dahej and Paradip, and Indian engineering firms design many of them.
Take, for example, a plant in Bharuch that is to make a solvent. The process engineers first run the process in simulation to find the size of each tank and the heat it needs. The piping designers then place the tanks and pipes in 3D, so that a person can walk between them and a pipe does not pass through a steel beam. Once the plant is built, the same design is used to run and maintain it. A plant digital twin keeps a live copy of the plant, built from this design and from sensor data. The distributed control system (DCS) controls the plant's operation.
This work uses the same digital thread as product design, but the output is a whole plant, built once, and not a part made again and again.