Estimation of the Kinetic Parameters of a Catalytic Cracking Model Case Study

Abstract

This paper presents the research regarding determination of kinetic model parameters from a catalytic cracking process. Starting from the Weekman kinetic model, the authors proposed a simplified version of this model and, based on experimental data form a catalytic cracking plant, they have numerical determined the coefficients of the new kinetic model. For this purpose, there were defined two objective functions; the first function is based on errors generated by estimation of the riser outlet temperature and the second function associated to the errors generated by the estimation of the gasoline yield. The minimization of the two objective functions has been solve by using Optimization Toolbox from MATLAB programming language. The results showed that the objective function that depends on gasoline yield allows more accurate estimation of the kinetic parameters from this model.