A Parallel Processing Approach to Dynamic Simulation of Ethylbenzene Process

Parallel computing has been developed for many years in chemical process simulation. However, existing research on parallel computing in dynamic simulation cannot take full advantage of computer performance. More and more applications of data-driven methods and increasing complexity in chemical processes need faster dynamic simulators. In this research, we discuss the upper limit of speed-up for dynamic simulation of the chemical process. Then we design a parallel program considering the process model solving sequence and rewrite the General dynamic simulation & optimization system (DSO) with two levels of parallelism, multithreading parallelism and vectorized parallelism. The dependency between subtasks and the characteristic of the hottest subroutines are analyzed. Finally, the accelerating effect of the parallel simulator is tested based on a 500 kt·a−1 ethylbenzene process simulation. A 5-hour process simulation shows that the highest speed-up ratio to the original program is 261%, and the simulation finished in 70.98 s wall clock time.