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Focus on Software

| By Gerald Ondrey

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Run simulations faster with this software

Computing power has increased significantly since the early days of process simulation. However, CPU clock speed is not the driving factor anymore; it is number of cores. The ability to parallelize calculations to all the available CPU cores, as CHEMCAD NXT (photo) can, is the key to running orders of magnitude faster than before. Using CHEMCAD NXT’s Simultaneous Modular SQP Optimizer (which includes mixed-integer variables), companies can build optimizations directly into simulations they are already using for their work. Most chemical engineers are familiar with flowsheeting in a simulator, and most also understand the principles of optimization. Engineers also need confidence that the optimum found by the model is the global optimum. CHEMCAD NXT handles this by parallelizing a large number of starting positions. Multiple restarts are performed until several solutions converge within set tolerances. Therefore, CHEMCAD NXT’s calculation speed increases the odds of finding the global optimum in a reasonable amount of time and each simulation run is extremely fast. The improvement in run-time for a complex optimization is on the order of 7–10 times faster from single-threaded to six-core calculation. Machines with more cores will give relatively similar performance increases, depending on simulation complexity. — Chemstations, Inc., Houston

www.chemstations.com

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