Accurate and Fast Fischer-Tropsch Reaction Microkinetics using PINNs
Harshil Patel Aniruddha Panda Tymofii Nikolaienko Stanislav Jaso Alejandro Lopez Kaushic Kalyanaraman
Microkinetics allows detailed modelling of chemical transformations occurring
in many industrially relevant reactions. Traditional way of solving the
microkinetics model for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) becomes inefficient
when it comes to more advanced real-time applications. In this work, we address
these challenges by using physics-informed neural networks(PINNs) for modelling
FTS microkinetics. We propose a computationally efficient and accurate method,
enabling the ultra-fast solution of the existing microkinetics models in
realistic process conditions. The proposed PINN model computes the fraction of
vacant catalytic sites, a key quantity in FTS microkinetics, with median
relative error (MRE) of 0.03%, and the FTS product formation rates with MRE of
0.1%. Compared to conventional equation solvers, the model achieves up to 1E+06
times speed-up when running on GPUs, thus being fast enough for multi-scale and
multi-physics reactor modelling and enabling its applications in real-time
process control and optimization.