Abstract

Due to the large amount of compounds present in heavy crudes and bitumens, kinetic modeling of hydrocracking is generally used lumping models to simplify calculations. One way to ensure that the model regime depends only on the reaction mechanisms is to obtain intrinsic kinetics. This happens when it is verified that the transport resistances are negligible depending on the reactor system. Therefore, the kinetic reaction parameters obtained (rate constant, activation energies and collision factors) are affected only by the reaction and not the diffusion phenomena within the reactor. Another important factor to verify in kinetic modeling is that the assumed order of reaction is indeed appropriate and this is done by graphing the variation of the conversion with respect to time in the appropriate power law model according to our reaction system. The sensitivity analysis is a tool that allows confirming that the values of the parameters obtained during kinetic modeling are the best since very few kinetic studies reported in the literature provide sufficient evidence to guarantee that the values of the parameters correspond to the optimal ones.