The efficient computation of periodic states of cyclically operated chemical processes

In this paper we present a shooting method in combination with a hybrid Newton–Picard method to compute efficiently the periodic states of cyclically operated chemical processes. The merits of the method are investigated by considering the computation of the periodic states of a rapid pressure swing adsorption system and of a cooled reverse-flow reactor.We show that these periodically forced chemical processes exhibit low-dimensional dynamics. The Newton–Picard method is designed to make efficient use of this low-dimensional dynamics of the chemical processes. In addition the Newton–Picard method is able to determine the stability of the computed periodic states. As an illustration of the efficiency of the method, we compute a branch of periodic states for the reverse flow reactor.