A computationally simple technique for analyzing catalyst inhibition dynamics involving multiple competing inhibitors

In catalyst development a targeted reaction often is inhibited by strongly adsorbed species that are present in the feed. To develop means of mitigating the inhibition effect, it is important to gain a predictive understanding of the inhibition dynamics from modeling of transient response experiments. This approach can also be used for catalyst characterization and mechanistic kinetics studies. Accordingly, this work considers a general class of catalyst inhibition problems involving m competing inhibitors in fixed-bed reactors under non-equilibrium conditions. A mathematical model consisting of a system of 2m+1 nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations is reduced to that of 2m first-order ordinary differential equations. The result is an efficient method for discriminating rival models and extracting active site densities and adsorption-reaction rate constants from transient response data.