Kinetic study on the mixing region of a hydrocarbon reformer

Abstract

ABSTRACT Complete mixture preparation of reactants prior to catalytic reforming is an enormously important step for successful operation of a fuel reformer. Incomplete mixing between fuel and reforming agents such as air and steam can cause temperature overshoot and deposit formation which can lead the failure of operation. For that purpose it is required to apply computational models describing coupled kinetics and transport phenomena in the mixing region, which are computationally expensive. Therefore, it is advantageous to analyze the gas-phase reaction kinetics prior to application of the coupled model. This study suggests one of the important design constraints, the required residence time in the mixing chamber to avoid substantial gas-phase reactions which can lead serious deposit formation on the downstream catalyst. The reactivity of various gaseous and liquid fuels were compared, then liquid fuels are far more reactive than gaseous fuels. n-Octane was used as a surrogate among the various hydrocarbons, which is one of the traditional liquid fuel surrogates. The conversion was slighted effected by reactants composition described by O/C and S/C. Finally, threshold residence times in the mixing region of a hydrocarbon reformer were studied and the mixing chamber is required to be designed to make complete mixture of reactants by tens of milliseconds at the temperature lower than 400℃.KEY WORDS : Reforming(개질), Hydrocarbon(탄화수소), Mixing(혼합), Reaction kinetics(반응동역학), Modeling( 모델링)