Se. Zitney et Ma. Stadtherr, SUPERCOMPUTING STRATEGIES FOR THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX SEPARATION SYSTEMS, Industrial & engineering chemistry research, 32(4), 1993, pp. 604-612
The solution of large, sparse, linear equation systems is a critical c
omputational step in the analysis and design of interlinked separation
columns. If the modeling equations for a separation system are groupe
d by equilibrium stage, the linear systems take on an almost-block-tri
diagonal form. We study here the use of the frontal approach to solve
these linear systems on supercomputers. The frontal approach is potent
ially attractive because it exploits vector processing architectures b
y treating parts of the sparse matrix as full submatrices, thereby all
owing arithmetic operations to be performed with easily vectorizable f
ull-matrix code. The performance of the frontal method for different m
atrix orderings and different numbers of components is considered. Nin
e interlinked distillation systems are used as test problems. Results
indicate that the frontal approach provides substantial savings in com
putation time, an order of magnitude in some cases, compared to tradit
ional sparse matrix techniques.