Changing Roles for Supercomputing in Chemical Engineering

Traditionally, supercomputers have been used by the chemical engineering community to provide the power needed to obtain solutions of mathematical models that describe complex physical and chemical processes. That view is changing. Beyond simply increasing the resolu tion of the calculations, or decreasing the elapsed time for a solution, chemical engineers are now beginning to use supercomputers to perform design and optimization of chemical processes, as a way to augment and im prove conventional experimental research, and, most importantly, as a way to open up new problem areas that in the past have only been solved by heuristic tech niques. Several illustrative examples—reacting polymer systems, design of control strategies for photochemical air pollution, solution of stiff differential systems, and batch scheduling—are presented to demonstrate the benefits associated with this new view of how super computers can be used by the chemical engineering profession.