LAUSR

Abstract Determination and monitoring of the reaction parameters such as “methanol conversion” and “products selectivity” in methanol to gasoline process is an essential part. Determination of these parameters are usually performed by gas chromatography or other chromatographic based methods which are considered as expensive and time consuming routes. A method for rapid and cheap determination of methanol conversion and product selectivity to aromatics and iso-paraffins in methanol to gasoline process as a route for clean gasoline production was proposed. The method can be performed off-line, on-line or at-line as a process analytical technology tool. The method consists of obtaining near infrared and mid infrared spectra from organic and aqueous fractions of methanol to gasoline reactor during the reaction. The spectroscopic data were treated using least squares support vector machine algorithm and product selectivity -to aromatics and iso-paraffins- and methanol conversion parameters were modelled. The least squares support vector machine results were obtained using radial basis function and parameter optimization was performed using the simplex method. The gas-chromatography method was used as the reference method. The root mean squared error of prediction values were 2.7 (v/v%) for aromatics, 1.4 (v/v%) for iso-paraffins and 1.5 (w/w%) for methanol conversion parameters. The proposed method compared to the existing chromatographic based techniques can provide a cleaner, faster and cheaper route with good accuracy for measurement of this catalytic reaction parameters.