Chemical kinetic modeling has been used for many years in process optimization, estimating real-time material performance, and lifetime prediction. Chemists have tended towards developing detailed mechanistic models, while engineers have tended towards global or lumped models. Many, if not most, applications use global models by necessity, since it is impractical or impossible to develop a rigorous mechanistic model. Model fitting acquired a bad connotation in the thermal analysis community after that community realized a decade after other disciplines that deriving kinetic parameters for an assumed model from a single heating rate produced unreliable and sometimes nonsensical results. In its place, advanced isoconversional methods, which have their roots in the Friedman and Ozawa-Flynn-Wall methods of the 1960s, have become increasingly popular. In fact, as pointed out by the ICTAC kinetics project in 2000, valid kinetic parameters can be derived by both isoconversional and model fitting methods as long as a diverse set of thermal histories are used to derive the kinetic parameters. The current paper extends the understanding from that project to give a better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of isoconversional and model-fitting approaches. Examples are given from a variety of data sets
