Infected zone model II: Analyses of published experimental data

Abstract

In a previous paper, a catalyst deactivation model for chemical poisoning was developed based on the concept that a poison influences more than the site (s) it occupies when adsorbed on a catalyst surface. The sites which are influenced but not occupied are called infected sites, and a collection of these sites is termed an infected zone. The mathematical formulation of the Infected Zone Model takes into account all of the various sites on the surface: normal, completely deactivated, and infected. To describe the deactivation of a reactive system, material balances of the flow streams and kinetics data are also needed. In this work, published experimental data from three different sources were analyzed using the infected zone model equations. The results indicate that better fits can be obtained in some cases, and confirm that the number of sites affected by a poison is larger than the number of sites actually occupied.