Computational aspects of kinetic analysis.: Part C. The ICTAC Kinetics Project — the light at the end of the tunnel?

The paper discusses the kinetic results, which the participants in the ICTAC Kinetics Project have produced from the provided isothermal and nonisothermal data on a hypothetical simulated process, as well as on the thermal decomposition of ammonium perchlorate. The majority of the participants have applied various model-free techniques that employ multiple sets of isothermal or/and nonisothermal data obtained at different temperatures or/and at different heating rates. These ‘multi-set’ methods have been very successful in detecting multi-step kinetics in the data provided. Fitting data to multi-step kinetic models has allowed the ‘true mechanism’ to be guessed for the simulated data. For the real data, the mechanistic guesses happened to be uncertain. Various ‘multi-set’ methods have allowed fairly consistent values of the Arrhenius parameters to be derived from isothermal and nonisothermal data.