An inverse problem in estimating simultaneously the non-linear reaction rates for a fixed-bed reactor

The Conjugate Gradient Method (CGM) is adopted in this study to estimate simultaneously the unknown conversion and temperature-dependent reaction rates for a fixed-bed reactor by using interior measurements of conversion and temperature distributions. The validity and accuracy of this inverse fixed-bed reactor problem was examined using the simulated exact and inexact conversion and temperature measurements in the numerical experiments. Numerical simulations indicate that the estimation of the conversion and temperature-dependent reaction rates can be obtained quickly on an Intel Xeon Core 2 2.00GHz personal computer and the estimations are still reliable when measurement errors are included since in test case 1 the maximum average errors for the estimated R₁(r,z) and R₂(r,z) are obtained as 0.85%, and 1.4%, respectively, in test case 2 they are 2.58% and 3.98%, respectively.