Modelling of fatty acid deoxygenation in a packed bed reactor

The modeling of deoxygenation of stearic acid over Pd supported on mesoporous and microporous carbon in a packed bed reactor was studied. The main product and by-product were n-heptadecane and n-heptadecene, respectively. The model was used extensively for simulations and sensitivity analysis and was also applied to estimate the main kinetic parameters. The role of internal diffusion in the catalyst particles was insignificant because of the low reaction rate. A parameter sensitivity study showed that coking reaction rate exhibited a large effect on reaction time at certain conversion level until the more stable operation was reached. Final parameter estimation was carried out without using weighting factors in the least square optimization routine for any experimental point. The model predicted well the dynamic behavior of the packed bed reactor. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the CHISA 2012 - 20th International Congress of Chemical and Process Engineering and PRES 2012 - 15th Conference on Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction (Prague, Czech Republic 8/25-29/2012).