The gap between a reaction that works and a process that can be built
Chemical engineers are bad at chemistry, and chemists are bad at math, and the gap between those two sentences is where good ideas go to die. This is the one-pager I wrote for chemists about closing it.
Out now
Try Reflux Student free on Aspen Plus
Reflux Student drives your own Aspen Plus V14 from plain English. You type what you want, it opens the case, makes the change in Aspen, runs it, reads the result back and tells you what it verified. Aspen does the math. You keep the judgment. Windows, your own licence, and free to start is a trial with a limit on it, not a free product.
Enter your email on the next page and the download link lands in your inbox, so you can open it on the Windows machine Aspen lives on. Windows will say it does not recognise the app the first time: click More info, then Run anyway. The certificate is new and Windows trusts it by reputation, which takes downloads to build. Nothing is wrong with the file.
Not on Aspen Plus? Tell me which simulator you use → and you hear the day your build exists.
The problem
Between a reaction that works in a flask and a process that can be built and sold sits a mountain of work: balances, reactor and separation design, utilities, cost, safety, footprint. Nearly all of it lives inside simulation software that takes most of a year to learn and was built for a different generation of engineer.
The consequence
A lot of excellent chemistry never gets assessed at scale, because the assessment belongs to somebody else and the tools were never built for the person who did the original work.
What I am building
You describe your chemistry and the scale you are imagining in plain language and get a real process model back, one you can interrogate, adjust and defend, built through conversation instead of a year of training.
If your work stopped at a result that would matter at scale
That boundary is the one we are working on. We are especially keen to speak with people in energy and sustainability research, catalysis and reaction engineering, green chemistry and life cycle assessment, and anyone whose research has a commercial destination in view.
We’re opening a small trial to people who ask for it, and we are not precious about which software you run. Whatever you use, we’ll build for it.
Nathan Ruberto · Co‑Founder, CEO
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