Flowsheet Visualizer Concepts

Overview

The Flowsheet Visualizer (FV) is intended for exploring existing IDAES models. It will automatically generate a diagram for any model. Here is an example of the default display:

You can see here the diagram and stream table.

Workflow

Currently, the FV is designed to be run locally, on a user’s desktop machine. Although the interface shows in a web browser, it will be getting its information from the local memory where the model was created and solved. Because the FV stays in communication with the Python interpreter that started it, if you are running in an interactive Python interpreter – including a Python console, Jupyter Notebook, or IDE window – then any subsequent changes to the underlying model (structural or by re-solving) can be reflected in the FV. As a corollary, FV exits with the Python interpreter, so if you are running a script that invokes the FV at the end to view the results, make sure you don’t exit the program; see the run from a script in the How-to for more details.

A summary of the interactive workflow that the FV enables is shown below: