Comparative study of the optimal operation of methane reforming process in cylindrical and spherical reactors using multi-objective optimization

Abstract

We present a multi-objective optimization (MOO) based study of the optimal operation of methane reformer for spherical reactor and compare the results with the ones for the cylindrical reactor. We considered three objective functions for this comparative study, namely maximization of hydrogen production, minimization of carbon dioxide emission, and minimization of power loss due to pressure drop in the reactor. We solve four MOO problems, which include three 2-objective problems with each pair of the aforementioned three objectives. In addition, we also solve a three objective problem considering all the three objectives. The optimization variables considered for the MOO study correspond to the feed conditions. Specifically, the three variables include the inlet temperature and the molar feed ratios of oxygen to methane & steam to methane.