One of the most important processes in the petrochemical industry is the cracking of light hydrocarbons to produce commercially more important products such as light olefins and aromatics, which are considered key components of the chemical industry. This process is carried out at high temperatures...

One of the most important processes in the petrochemical industry is the cracking of light hydrocarbons to produce commercially more important products such as light olefins and aromatics, which are considered key components of the chemical industry. This process is carried out at high temperatures in a tubular reactor located in large gas-fired furnaces that supplies heat. The topic of this work is to apply process optimization to the operation of thermal cracking of ethane in order to maximize the production of ethylene. The cracking reactor was modeled as a one-dimensional tubular reactor, and the kinetic mechanism used here is a detailed free-radical scheme that was carefully selected from literature. This application is a challenging problem because of the presence of a free-radical mechanism that coupled with material, energy, and momentum balances of the reactant-product flow along the reactor leads to stiff differential equations that are difficult to solve. In this work, these differential-algebraic equations are discretized using orthogonal collocation on finite elements, and the collocation equations are used as equality constraints in the non-linear optimization problem. GAMS optimization-modeling platform is used to implement this optimization problem. A comparison between model results and experimental data shows that the used approach is a good alternative for dealing with this type of optimization problem

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