A singular function approach to chemical vapor deposition model reduction

A computational technique for producing reduced-order models of distributed parameter systems is developed in the context of a tungsten chemical vapor deposition (CVD) simulation problem. The reduced order simulations are formulated in terms of a reduced-basis Galerkin projection of the CVD system thermal dynamics model, where the trial functions are defined globally over the spatial domain and the entire processing cycle, reducing the simulation problem to the solution of a relatively small number of nonlinear algebraic equations. The singular functions used for the reduced basis are computed from eigenfunction expansion solutions of linearized, approximate models to the original nonlinear system. The resulting singular functions are found to be nearly identical to those produced by the proper orthogonal decomposition of data produced by converged simulations of the nonlinear system