Data-driven surrogate modelling and benchmarking for process equipment
This work provides incremental improvements in surrogate modelling for chemical process equipment, aiding engineers in optimization and sensitivity analysis.
The study tackled the need for surrogate models in chemical process engineering by comparing various regression-based active learning strategies and sampling methods using CFD simulations, finding that Gaussian process regression consistently performed well across four industrial test cases.
In chemical process engineering, surrogate models of complex systems are often necessary for tasks of domain exploration, sensitivity analysis of the design parameters, and optimization. A suite of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations geared toward chemical process equipment modeling has been developed and validated with experimental results from the literature. Various regression-based active learning strategies are explored with these CFD simulators in-the-loop under the constraints of a limited function evaluation budget. Specifically, five different sampling strategies and five regression techniques are compared, considering a set of four test cases of industrial significance and varying complexity. Gaussian process regression was observed to have a consistently good performance for these applications. The present quantitative study outlines the pros and cons of the different available techniques and highlights the best practices for their adoption. The test cases and tools are available with an open-source license to ensure reproducibility and engage the wider research community in contributing to both the CFD models and developing and benchmarking new improved algorithms tailored to this field.