Lumped kinetic model for degradation of chitosan by hydrodynamic cavitation

Abstract

The lumped kinetic model for the degradation reactions of chitosan by hydrodynamic cavitation was investigated in this study. The molecular weight distributions and mass concentrations were determined by gel permeation chromatograph (GPC). The degradation products were divided into several lumps according to their molecular weights. The appropriate number of lumps for the kinetic study was determined by comparing the residual sum of squares (RSS) values among different models. The RSS of six-lumped model (5.36 × 10−3) was relatively small and the estimation of parameters was simpler than other models. In this paper, six-lumped kinetic model was adopted and the corresponding reaction network was established. The kinetic parameters were estimated with the Levenberg-Marquardt, and the results showed that the degradation reaction of chitosan was mainly dominated by the formation of degradation products with similar molecular weights. The maximum value of kinetic parameters on the diagonal of the reaction network (1.63 × 10−1) was much larger than that of non-diagonal kinetic parameters (3.78 × 10−2). According to the results calculated and measured under different conditions, this model could accurately predict the concentration distributions of lumps in the reaction network, and most of the average absolute deviation were smaller than 9.3%.