Few-Step Kinetic Model of Gaseous Autocatalytic Ethane Pyrolysis and Its Evaluation by Means of Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis

A kinetic scheme of radical chain reactions in autocatalytic pyrolysis of ethane was studied using a sensitivity analysis method, bringing in the experimental data. In the gas-phase kinetic experiments, ethane pyrolysis was carried out in laboratory reactors with the reaction mixture heated by CO2 laser irradiation. It was shown that the scheme with autocatalytic routes includes as few steps as possible and adequately describes the ethane pyrolysis with high ethylene yield at 900–1,150 K. Admissible variation ranges of preexponential factors and activation energies for the kinetic model of the reactions were found using the Monte Carlo statistical method. Reducibility of the scheme was examined by means of the Sobol’s variance based strategy applied for the sensitivity analysis evaluation.