by jasper » 11 June 2015, 08:08
Not at this point.
COFE disallows, by default, connection of different material types to a single unit. But you can tick this off at the Ports tab when double clicking the unit, as for some unit operations (e.g. a heat exchanger) this is valid.
The Excel unit operation however makes the assumption of a single compound slate, and its validate method checks for this; you will not be able to run an Excel unit operation connected to streams with different compound slates. This assumption covers by far most cases, and letting go of this restriction complicates things a lot in the layout of the Excel sheets and in the arguments to the thermodynamic routines. This is not an easy assumption to drop. Same holds for the Matlab and Scilab unit ops, so they do not provide a way out in this case.
I am afraid that your next step will be a custom unit operation, which involves some programming. Or perhaps you can get away with a combination of two Excel unit operations (one for one compound slate, the other for the other compound slate) that communicate via parameters (on virtual ports, on information streams). You could embed the combination of two Excel unit operations and the coupling information streams in a COFE unit operation, to make it look like a single unit operation.
(or a third party unit operation, not sure whether for example GO:CAPE-OPEN deals with multiple compound slates, but it might)