Simulation and analysis of complex distillation columns using continuation methods

Abstract This paper presents an efficient homotopy continuation method to solve a nonlinear eqaution system which describes chemical engineering problems. The characteristics of the Newton homotopy function is studied and parametric continuation is proposed to study steady state multiplicities for a constrained system. An equation based distillation simulator employing the proposed algorithm was implemented. The proposed algorithm and simulator were tested on many numerical problems and complex distillation columns.