A Frontal Algorithm for Equation-based Chemical Process Flowsheeting on Vector Computers
SE Zitney, Stadtherr · 1988
We present a frontal algorithm for solving (in core) the large, sparse, linear equation systems arising in equation-based (EB) chemical process flowsheeting. The frontal approach is generally used as a banded matrix solver in connection with finite element problems. We adapt it here to the more general process flowsheeting matrix. The motivation is that the approach exploits vector computer architectures by treating parts of the sparse flowsheeting matrix as full, thereby allowing arithmetic operations to be performed with easily vectorized full-matrix code. SEQUEL-II, our prototype EB flowsheeting system, is used to study the performance of the frontal algorithm on the Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer. Results indicate that, when used with a reverse-P4 row ordering, the frontal algorithm performs very well in comparison to the general-purpose sparse matrix solver, LUISOL.