Estimation of a deactivation model for the methanol synthesis catalyst from historic process data

摘要

The scope of this work was to develop a deactivation model for the methanol synthesis catalyst that includes the effect of temperature and water, based on historic process data from a methanol plant. A model on the generalized power law form was successfully fitted to process data from a limited period of time. The estimated model is of second order. No measurable effect of water was found, probably because the variations in the feed compositions were to small. The model parameters are not valid for the total catalyst lifetime because the deactivation process is fast in the beginning and slower after some time. Data from a larger period of time is needed to estimate a model that is valid over the total catalyst lifetime. It has been demonstrated that the historic process data contains enough information to estimate a catalyst deactivation model that describes the effect of temperature, but too little information to estimate the effect of the reaction mixture composition.