Component Object

Component objects are used in the IDAES Process Modeling Framework to identify the chemical species of interest in a property package and to contain information describing the behavior of that component (such as properties of that component). Additional information on the Component Class is provided in the technical specifications.

The IDAES Process Modeling Framework currently supports the following types of components.

• Component - general purpose object for representing chemical species.
• Solute - component object for representing species which should be treated as a solute in a LiquidPhase.
• Solvent - component object for representing species which should be treated as a solvent in a LiquidPhase.
• Ion - general purpose component object for representing ion species (LiquidPhase only). Users should generally use the Anion or Cation components instead.
• Anion - component object for representing ion species with a negative charge (LiquidPhase only).
• Cation - component object for representing ion species with a positive charger(LiquidPhase only).

Component objects are intended to store all the necessary information regarding a given chemical species for use within a process model. Examples of such information include the methods and parameters required for calculating thermophysical properties. Additionally, certain unit operations handle components in different ways depending on certain criteria. An example of this is Reverse Osmosis, where the driving force across the membrane is calculated differently for solvent species and solute species.

Component objects implement the following methods for determining species behavior:

• is_solute() - returns True if species is a solute (Solute, Ion, Anion or Cation component objects), otherwise False.
• is_solvent() - returns True if species is a solvent (Solvent component object), otherwise False.

Note

The general purpose Component object does not distinguish solutes and solvents, and these methods will will raise a TypeError instead.