In this work, a dynamic model of a catalytic fixed bed reactor (FBR) based on partial differential equations (PDE) is introduced and used for the identification of reaction mechanisms, which take place during the oxidation of sulfur dioxide over a vanadium pentoxid catalyst. The measured data is collected from a pilot plant, which uses commercial sized catalyst particles. In order to reduce the experimental effort a developed framework based on the methods of nonlinear optimal experimental design is applied using a steady state FBR model. The systematic procedure is improved using a dynamic reactor model. This makes the time dependent measurement data valuable for the identification procedure.