Single Event Kinetic Modelling without Explicit Generation of Large Networks: Application to Hydrocracking of Long Paraffins

The single event modelling concept allows developing kinetic models for the simulation of refinery processes. For reaction networks with several hundreds of thousands of species, as is the case for catalytic reforming, rigorous relumping by carbon atom number and branching degree were efficiently employed by assuming chemical equilibrium in each lump. This relumping technique yields a compact lumped model without any loss of information, but requires the full detail of an explicitly generated reaction network. Classic network generation techniques become impractical when the hydrocarbon species contain more than approximately 20 carbon atoms, because of the extremely rapid growth of reaction network. Hence, implicit relumping techniques were developed in order to compute lumping coefficients without generating the detailed reaction network. Two alternative and equivalent approaches are presented, based either on structural classes or on lateral chain decomposition. These two methods are discussed and the lateral chain decomposition method is applied to the kinetic modelling of long chain paraffin hydroisomerization and hydrocracking. The lateral chain decomposition technique is exactly equivalent to the original calculation method based on the explicitly generated detailed reaction network, as long as Benson’s group contribution method is used to calculate the necessary thermodynamic data in both approaches