Statistical Review of Runaway Reaction Kinetics

The calculated self-heating rate of vinyl acetate polymerization runaway reaction was analyzed by means of statistical tools.  The data come from a VSP2 experiment that was performed for a DIERS round-robin test.  It is shown that all factors are collinear, i.e., there is linear dependence between the factors, meaning that the model is inflated.  Consequently, the parameters are highly distorted, many of which do not make physical sense.  It is shown how to reduce collinearity to a manageable level and how to perform reparametrization to lessen interdependency between the parameters.  The outcome is the shortest and less correleated form of the self-heating rate equation, which can be used for process-safety evaluations.