Time Resolution in Transient Kinetics

Paper in proceeding, 2015

This study presents the mathematical background of deconvolution of concentration data in transient kinetic studies. In a case study with a flow reactor setup, it has been shown that the deconvolution algorithm results in a significant reduction in the time lag of an FTIR detector from around 23 s to around 1.2 s. This is an important achievement as otherwise the dynamic information of a reactive system (like the rate of adsorption or accumulation of surface species) would have been lost during that time interval. Using the regularizing theory of ill-posed, inverse problems, an algorithm for deconvolution of concentration measurements has been developed based on the discrepancy principle. Our software package, TranKin, can be easily adapted to various other laboratory reactor systems to enhance the time resolution of transient experiments.