SURROGATE BASED SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF PROCESS EQUIPMENT

The computational cost associated with the use of high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models poses a serious impediment to the successful application of formal sensitivity analysis in engineering design. Even though advances in computing hardware and parallel processing have reduced costs by orders of magnitude over the last few decades, the fidelity with which engineers desire to model engineering systems has also increased considerably. Evaluation of such high-fidelity models may take significant computational time for complex geometries. In many engineering design problems, thousands of function evaluations may be required to undertake a sensitivity analysis. As a result, CFD models are ofte