Abstract:
Steam methane reforming is one of the most used methods for hydrogen generation. The use of a perm-selective membrane in the conventional steam methane reformer (SMR) is a promising technology to produce ultra-pure hydrogen under moderate operating conditions. The challenge in designing and scaling up the membrane SMR lies in the suitable selection of operating conditions. The objective of this research was to perform a detailed computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis of a membrane SMR unit for an on-site hydrogen refueling station (HRS) to get the optimum operating conditions. In this work, the global kinetic model of reforming reactions and the sievert’s law for hydrogen permeation were coupled with CFD by writing user-defined functions (UDF) in C language. The developed model was validated with the experimental results and then a comprehensive analysis was performed to study the effects of gas hourly space velocity (GHSV), process gas inlet temperature, operating pressure, and sweep gas flow configurations. The obtained results predicted that the high process gas inlet temperature, the high operating pressure, and the low GHSV were advantageous, however, these factors must be carefully adjusted to achieve optimal efficiency. Furthermore, the simulation with a counter-current sweep gas flow configuration gave better results as compared to a co-current operation. The study's major observations and optimal operating parameters were explored to give insight into the aspects controlling overall performance.
Page(s):
0-0
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: Sixth International Conference on Sustainability in Process Industries (SPI) 19-20 Octover 2022 (Book of Abstracts), Volume: 0, Issue: 0, Year: 2022