Modeling of an industrial naphtha isomerization reactor and development and assessment of a new isomerization process

[Display omitted] •Mathematical model of an industrial naphtha izomerization reactor is developed.•Parameter estimation technique is utilized to find the best kinetic parameters.•The optimal design of the reactor is validated against industrial experimental data.•A new izomerization process is proposed and its performance is evaluated. Naphtha isomerization is an important issue in petroleum industries and it has to be a simple and cost effective technology for producing clean fuel with high gasoline octane number. In this work, based on real industrial data, a detailed process model is developed for an existing naphtha isomerization reactor of Baiji North Refinery (BNR) of Iraq which involves estimation of the kinetic parameters of the reactor. The optimal values of the kinetic parameters are estimated via minimizing the sum of squared errors between the predicted and the experimental data of BNR. Finally, a new isomerization process (named as AJAM process) is proposed and using the reactor model developed earlier, the reactor condition is optimized which maximizes the yield and research octane number (RON) of the reactor.