Incremental and simultaneous identification of reaction kinetics: methods and comparison

Short cut procedures such as the differential method are still popular for the identification of reaction kinetics. Despite their lack of statistical rigor their computational efficiency makes them a valuable tool for initial analysis. A new incremental approach is introduced here to extend the differential method. This identification procedure is split in a sequence of inverse problems, thereby reducing uncertainty and computational complexity. Since error propagation remains critical for the success of such a stepwise approach the influence of error propagation has to be analyzed. Consequently, the performance of the incremental strategy is compared to that of the simultaneous approach which exhibits optimal statistical properties. A pedagogical example is considered in detail to extract general conclusions. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.