A Detailed Reaction Kinetic Model of Heavy Naphtha Reforming

A detailed reaction kinetic model was developed to describe heavy naphtha reforming reactions. The kinetic model involved 32 lumps and 132 reactions; the lumps were one to 11 carbon atoms n-paraffins, four to 11 carbon atoms iso-paraffins, methylcyclopentene, and six to 11 carbon atoms for naphthenes and aromatics. All computations in the present study were predicted using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method coded by MATLAB 2015a software. This optimization method was used to estimate the optimum set of kinetic parameters of heavy naphtha reforming reactions. All 150 kinetic and deactivation parameters that were predicted in this work were fine-tuned using PSO. The proposed kinetic model was validated by benchmarking the model results with the data collected over 5 years for a commercial naphtha reforming unit. The mean absolute error for all component compositions within the process was found to be 0.0079. The catalyst deactivation rate was also predicted. It was found that catalyst activity decayed to 58.8% after 1225 operating days.