Comparative study of kinetic modeling for the oxidative coupling of methane by genetic and marquardt algorithms

Overall kinetic studies on the oxidative coupling of methane, OCM, have been conducted in a tubular fixed bed reactor, using perovskite titanate as the reaction catalyst. The appropriate operating conditions were found to be: temperature 750–775 °C, total feed flow rate of 160 ml/min, CH4/O2 ratio of 2 and GHSV of 100 min−1. Under these conditions, C2 yield of 28% was achieved. Correlations of the kinetic data have been performed with lumped rate equations for C2 and COx formation as functions of temperature, O2 and CH4 partial pressures. Six models have been selected among the common lumped kinetic models. The selected models have been regressed with the experimental data which were obtained from the Catatest system by genetic algorithm in order to obtain optimized parameters. The kinetic coefficients in the overall reactions were optimized by different numerical optimization methods such as: the Levenberg-Marquardt and genetic algorithms and the results were compared with one another. It has been found that the Santamaria model is in good agreement with the experimental data. The Arrhenius parameters of this model have been obtained by linear regression. It should be noted that the Marquardt algorithm is sensitive to the first guesses and there is possibility to trap in the relative minimum.