abstract
- In this work, a fractional kinetic model is proposed to describe the reduction stage of a Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) system, extending the ordinary kinetic formulation through the inclusion of fractional operators. The model parameters and fractional orders are estimated from experimental data using a nonlinear parameter estimation framework, and the fractional model shows lower global errors and generally lower CO2 yield errors than the ordinary model. To demonstrate the numerical applicability of this methodology to optimal control problems, the fractional kinetic model is incorporated into a multiobjective fractional optimal control framework based on a simplified spatially homogeneous representation of the reduction stage, where the reactor temperature and volumetric molar fuel feed rate trajectories are treated as decision variables to balance oxygen carrier (OC) conversion and CO2 yield. The resulting problem is solved by combining a numerical integration scheme for fractional differential equations with a quasi-Newton BFGS algorithm. The results demonstrate the numerical feasibility of the proposed fractional optimal control framework and indicate that it could be used to address problems in the field of chemical engineering.