Kinetic Modeling of Methanol Synthesis: from Carbon Monoxide, Carbon Dioxide, and Hydrogen over a Cu/zno / Chromia Catalyst

Methanol offers many benefits as an alternative energy source and is of use in a multitude of applications, therefore, optimizing and enhancing its production by modeling its reaction kinetics could be of considerable importance. Due to the disagreement on the methanol synthesis reaction scheme, there is always a scope to develop new and effective kinetic models which can prove to be useful in the improvement of the process resulting in high methanol yields and greater profits. The main purpose of this study was to investigate kinetic models proposed in the literature for methanol synthesis and select the best fit model using regression techniques in POLYMATH. Another aim was to use the results from the best fit model to explain some aspects and resolve some questions related to methanol synthesis kinetics. The statistical results from POLYMATH were used for comparison of the models and selection of the best fit kinetic model.