Applying Genetic Algorithms in Chemical Engineering for Determining Zeolite Structures.

Zeolites are crystalline materials widely used in many catalytic process in industry. Specifically, they have a major impact at petrochemicals, fine chemicals or gas separation. Thus, discovering new zeolites with specific properties is a high-impact target for the industry, due to their huge economical repercussions. New tools and techniques are needed to help in this task, because trial and error approaches prevail until now. In this work, we propose a new application of genetic algorithms for helping chemical engineers in the process of determining zeolite structures with specific properties. Our proposal takes advantage of some symmetry operation properties to improve the performance of the genetic algorithm. Furthermore, a suitable fitness function has been designed which evaluates all main features required for efficient zeolites.