Collocation method for the modeling of membrane gas permeation systems

In this work, we describe a numerical method which enables an efficient computation of membrane gas permeation processes that involve multiple membrane stages and multiple gas components. The utilized numerical approach is a collocation method equipped with a grid adaptation strategy based on a dependable error estimate of the numerical approximation. The comparison of the results provided by the collocation method with those calculated from an experimentally validated finite difference method has demonstrated, that the accuracy of both numerical approximations is practically the same. However, the current procedure is characterized by a much better computational efficiency that allows to considerably reduce the computational time. This is a crucial feature when combining computation of membrane permeation processes with optimization algorithms. In such a setting the computation of the permeation process is frequently repeated and naturally, results in long computational times when the efficiency is not adequately improved.