A Non-linear Inverse Problem in Estimating the Reaction Rate Function for an Annular-Bed Reactor

Abstract

The conjugate gradient method, or iterative regularization method, based inverse algorithm is utilized in this work to predict the unknown concentration-dependent reaction rate function for an annular-bed reactor (ABR) using interior measurements of concentration distributions. Since no prior information on the functional form of unknown reaction rate is available, it can be classified as function estimation for the inverse calculation. The validity and accuracy of this inverse ABR problem are examined using the simulated exact and inexact concentration measurements in the numerical experiments. Results show that the estimation of the concentration-dependent reaction rate function can be obtained within a very short CPU time on an Intel Xeon Core 2 2.00 GHz personal computer, and reliable estimations can still be obtained when measurement errors are considered.