Chemometric treatment of chemical engineering data: a case study

In the course of the evaluation of experiments on a certain technology, different chemometric methods has been used. The aim of the experiments was the determination of those technical circumstances where methane could be most efficiently converted to formaldehyde by catalytic oxidation. The process has been studied in different reactors, at differently structured catalyst supports, at various temperatures, catalyst masses and concentrations, flow rates, residence times, etc. Space–time yield of formaldehyde was chosen to represent the efficiency of the process. The approximately 1000 data, obtained in 150 experiments involving approximately 10 variables were examined by some exploratory statistical techniques, followed by parameter estimations of kinetic models based on physical reasoning.