We present optimization algorithms for the design of complex hierarchical systems, motivated by applications to the design of nanoporous materials. Nanoporous materials have a broad range of engineering applications, including gas storage and filtration, electrical energy storage in batteries and capacitors, and catalysis. The design of such materials involves modeling of the material over many length scales, leading to a hierarchy of mathematical models. Our algorithms are also hierarchical in structure with the goal of exploiting the model hierarchy to obtain solutions more rapidly. We discuss the choice of optimization models, initialization schemes, the hierarchical optimization algorithm, software design, and computational results.
Introduction.We present optimization algorithms for the design of complex hierarchical systems, motivated by applications to the design of nanoporous materials. Nanoporous materials have a broad range of engineering applications, including gas storage and filtration, electrical energy storage in batteries and capacitors, and catalysis [1,18,36,8,29,21]. Because the design of such materials involves modeling of the material over many length scales, the underlying mathematical models can be considered as a hierarchy of models. Our algorithms are also hierarchical in structure with the goal of exploiting the model hierarchy to obtain solutions more rapidly.An important feature of nanoporous materials is that within the nanopores, a gas can be stored at a much higher density than is possible with equal pressure in an open tank. The problem for applications is that the diffusion of gas into and out of the storage material is very slow. To speed this process, engineers have considered putting channels of various widths into the material; this can be thought of as adding a "vascular" system. The trade-off is, of course, between speeding up the filling or emptying of the material and storing as much as possible. One version of the optimization problem, then, is to maximize the amount of gas that can be stored and extracted in a timely manner subject to sacrificing a fixed amount of volume that is made available for transport channels. Beyond storage of gas, nanoporous materials afford analogous benefits in the storage of electric charge in electrochemical capacitors and batteries.