Building a Kinetic Model for Steam Cracking by the Method of Structure-Oriented Lumping

A kinetic model for steam cracking has been developed by representing feedstock molecules and constructing reaction networks with the structure-oriented lumping method, calculating the reaction rate constant with Materials Studio software, and solving kinetic differential equations with a fourth−fifth-order Runge−Kutta algorithm. A total of 7 structure vectors and 74 reaction rules have been designed to describe molecular composition and their reactions. The model can predict product distribution of different light-oil steam-cracking processes at various operating conditions. Simulation results indicated that predicted data agreed well with the experimental results. Relative errors of ethylene and propylene were not more than 8%.