Abstract
Large-scale optimal design problems involving nonlinear differential equations are widely applied in modeling such as craft manufacturing, chemical engineering and energy engineering. Herein we propose a fast and flexible holomorphic embedding-based method to solve nonlinear differential equations quickly, and further apply it to handle the industrial application of reverse osmosis desalination. Without solving nonlinear differential equations at each discrete point by a traditional small-step iteration approach, the proposed method determines the solution through an approximation function or approximant within segmented computational domain independently. The results of solving more than 11 million of nonlinear differential equations with various design parameters for the reverse osmosis desalination process indicate that the fast and flexible holomorphic embedding-based method is six-fold faster than several typical solvers in computational efficiency with the same level of accuracy. The proposed computational method in this work has great application potential in engineering design.