A kinetic model for ethylene oligomerization using zirconium/aluminum- and nickel/zinc-based catalyst systems in a batch reactor

摘要

The aim of this work is to develop a kinetic model of the oligomerization of ethylene to linear alpha olefins (LAOs) for zirconium/aluminum and nickel/zinc catalyst systems. The development of such model helps in the study of the behavior of industrial LAOs reactors as well as in the optimization of their operation. The kinetic model was developed based on a four-step mechanism: site activation, initiation and propagation, chain transfer and site deactivation. A novel stochastic optimization algorithm, Intelligent Firefly Algorithm, was used to obtain the kinetic model parameters that best fit the available experimental data that were obtained from published sources. The values of the kinetic parameters were obtained for the developed kinetic models for two catalyst systems. The performance of the model with the estimated parameters was tested against the experimental data. The proposed kinetic model predicts the product distribution for the zirconium/aluminum catalyst system with suitable accuracy. The model can also predict the product distribution for the nickel/zinc catalyst system with good accuracy for all products. As expected, the accuracy of the model to predict the concentration of the higher carbon products decreases with the carbon number.