If you are doing or plan to carry out an experimental investigation of the reaction kinetics of a specific system, you could take the following recommendations into account:
- The experimental reactor should not be a small-scale copy of the industrial reactor
- Search for information on comparable chemical systems
- Determine in advance which kinetic data you really need
- Check for reproducibility by performing replicate experiments
- Start to carefully analyze your data for reaction sequence and influence of components as early as possible (already during the experiments and certainly before starting modeling)
- Use more theoretically based models if extrapolation
- Define several kinetic models and model selection criteria
- Use LHHW type rate expressions for heterogeneously catalyzed reactions (+ elementary surface reactions)
- Reduce correlations between adsorption constants by performing experiments with (co-)feeding intermediates or reaction products
- Decouple k0 and Eact
- Check for significance of the parameters (i.e. confidence range smaller than parameter value) (t-value)
- Check for adequacy of the model (F-test)
- Apply experimental design for model selection and improvement of parameter accuracy
