Kinetics Analysis by Digital Parameter Estimation

Abstract

One of the more important problems that a chemist or chemical engineer may encounter is the determination of the mechanism and/ or model for a chemical reaction system. This problem may be encompassed within the broader area of identification [30–32] which ranges from the one extreme where no a priori information regarding the system representation is known, to the other extreme where much is known about the system. The development of a suitable chemical kinetic representation for the experimental reaction system lies somewhere between these two extremes. This results from the fact that there usually exist certain postulated models to represent experimental kinetic data; however, the determination of the best constants in these mechanistic models and perhaps the discrimination among a number of alternative models usually remain as vexing questions.