Modeling of high-temperature reforming reactor based on interactive thermal control with a tail gas combustor

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to model hydrocarbon reforming by coupling detailed chemical kinetics with complex computational fluid dynamics. The entire chemistry of catalyzed reactions was confined within the geometrically simple channels and modeled using the low-dimensional plug model, into which the interactive thermal control of the multi-channel reforming reactor has been implemented with a tail-gas combustor around the external surface of these catalytic channels. The geometrically complex flow in the tail gas combustor was simulated using FLUENT without involving any chemical reactions. The influences of the conditions at the reactor inlet such as the inlet gas velocity, the inlet gas composition and the variety of hydrocarbons of each channel on gas conversions were investigated numerically. The impact of the tail gas combustor setup on the efficiency of the reforming reactor was also analyzed. Methane catalytic partial oxidation (CPO x ) and propane steam reforming (SR) were used to illustrate the approach reported in the present work.