Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 32, 604-612 (1993)
The solution of large, sparse, linear equation systems is a critical
computational step in the analysis and design of interlinked separation
columns. If the modeling equations for a separation system are grouped
by equilibrium stage, the linear systems take on an almost-block- tridiagonal
form. We study here the use of the frontal approach to solve these linear
systems on supercomputers. The frontal approach is potentially attractive
because it exploits vector processing architectures by treating parts of
the sparse matrix as full submatrices, thereby allowing arithmetic operations
to be performed with easily vectorizable full-matrix code. The performance
of the frontal method for different matrix orderings and different numbers
of components is considered. Nine interlinked distillation systems are
used as test problems. Results indicate that the frontal approach provides
substantial savings in computation time, an order of magnitude in some
cases, compared to traditional sparse matrix techniques.
Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 32, 604-612 (1993)
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