A methodology for estimating deactivation models for catalysts in industrial application is proposed. The method applies the movement of the measured axial temperature profile to gain information of the deactivating phenomena. For adiabatic reactors the conditions must be obtained by controlled heat compensation in a reactor furnace. As an example a deactivation model for the industrial methanol-to-gasoline (MTG) process is developed. The deactivation model together with suitable reactor models is a system of coupled partial differential equations with time and spatial coordinate as the independent variables. The unknown model parameters are estimated via a non-linear least square method, by matching predicted axial temperature profiles with measured profiles obtained in a pilot reactor containing a gasoline synthesis test catalyst. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.