In this work, Fe-Co-based mixed metal oxides supported
on Al2O3 are proposed for ethylene production
through
oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane with CO2 (ODH-CO2). Thermodynamic feasibility analysis followed by a systematic
experimental study is performed on catalyst synthesis and its composition
optimization along with process condition optimization in a fixed
bed reactor. The study revealed that 5% Fe loaded on 10% Co/Al2O3, 700 °C, and 1:1 are the optimal composition,
temperature, and molar ratio of CO2 to ethane, respectively,
achieving 29% ethane conversion and resulting in 16% ethylene yield.
Further, the experimental data was used to develop different linear,
nonlinear, and ensemble AI models for ethylene yield prediction through
a systematic grid search and k-fold cross-validation
procedure. Among all the models, the kernel ridge regression model
is found to be the most accurate, exhibiting the highest R
2 value of 0.966 and lowest root mean-squared error (RMSE)
of 0.032 on test data, successfully capturing the underlying nonlinear
dynamics of ODH-CO2.