Method used to interpolate compressor/expander curves

General description of compressor curve interpolation

In the HYSYS compressor operation, a cubic spline method is used for the interpolation of
the speed curves themselves and for the interpolation between speed curves. Here is an
outline of the procedure:

When multiple curves of different speed are provided (for example three curves for 9000 rpm,
11000 rpm and 13000 rpm), given the flow F, the first step is to calculate the Head and
Efficiency for the given flow (for each of the three curves) using a Cubic Spline Method (see
below). When the three pairs of data available (9000 rpm, HeadFor9000; 11000 rpm,
HeadFor11000; and 13000 rpm, HeadFor13000), the next step is to find out the head for a
specified speed for the speed specified (10000 rpm for example) using the Cubic Spline
Method again. The same procedure is used to find out the Efficiency.

If you input multiple curves into the compressor and then run the compressor at a speed
below the lowest curve (i.e. lowest speed), the method used in HYSYS includes a limited
functionality of extrapolation when the point lies outside of the data. Note that extrapolation
is generally not accurate enough depending on the degree of curve non-linearity.

Description of the cubic spline interpolation

The cubic polynomials are used to approximate the curve between each pair of data points.
The cubic spline uses a third-degree polynomial. Suppose we have a sets of data (t0,y0) .. (tn,
yn) known:

x: t0 t1 ..... tn
y: y0 y1 .... yn

The ti's are the knots and are assumed to be arranged in ascending order.
The cubic spline function S that we wish to construct consists of n cubic polynomial pieces:
S(x) = S0(x) t0 <= x <= t1
= S1(x) t1 <= x <= t2
......
= Sn-1(x) tn-1 <= x <= tn

The interpolation conditions are:

S(ti) = yi (0 <= i <= n)

The other two conditions are:

S''(t0) = S''(tn) = 0

The function S can be determined as

z i +1 z y h y h
S ( x) = ( x − t i ) 3 + i (t i +1 − x) 3 + ( i +1 − i z i +1 )( x − t i ) + ( i − i z i )(t i +1 − x)
6hi 6hi hi 6 hi 6
where h1 = ti+1- t1

When the values z0, z1, .. zn have been determined, the spline function S(x) is obtained from
equations of the above form for S0(x), S1(x), .., Sn-1(x).
The values z0, z1, .. zn can be obtained by solving a tridiagonal system of equations:
z0 = 0
hi-1zi-1 + ui zi + hi zi+1 = vi (1 <= i <= n-1)
zn = 0

where vi = 6(bi - bi-1)

bi = (1/hi) (yi+1 - yi)