Efficient chemical equilibria calculation by artificial neural networks for ammonia cracking and synthesis

Abstract

The calculation of chemical equilibria in detailed reactor simulations frequently requires elaborate numerical solution of the governing equations in an iterative way, which is often computationally expensive and can significantly increase the overall computation time. In order to reduce these computational costs, we introduce a ready-to-use tool, ANNH3, for calculation of equilibrium composition for synthesis and cracking of ammonia based on a neural network. This tool provides excellent agreement with the conventional approach in the range of 135–1000 °C and 1–100 bar and is ca. 100 times faster than conventional stoichiometry-based concepts by replacing the iterative solution process with neural network inference. While speed-up is significant even for the relatively simple case of ammonia synthesis and decomposition, we expect an even higher performance gain for the equilibrium calculation in reaction systems where more components and multiple reactions are involved.