Estimation of catalyst deactivation parameters of ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) reactors based on industrial plant data

This work considers the catalyst deactivation phenomena in ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) reactors, and the estimation of the corresponding kinetic parameters from industrial plant data. For this purpose a simulation model of these units is developed, and used to build a parameter estimation problem constrained by partial differential equations. Good agreement between the model predictions and the available industrial data is achieved, enabling the use of the resulting model in several process related tasks.