Modelling and experimental investigation of compact packed bed design of methanol steam reformer

Abstract

A comprehensive mathematical model was developed to analyse methanol steam reforming in catalytic packed-bed tubular reactor. All the important aspects of reaction kinetics of main reactions and thermodynamic terms of heat and mass transfer were studied for commercially available CuO/ZnO/Al2O3 catalysts from Süd-Chemie. This numerical model was simulated using Engineering Equation Solver (EES). Through the set of organized simulation studies, the basic operational boundary conditions of operating temperature (573 K) with respect to complete conversion of methanol and optimum hydrogen generation, optimum S/C ratio (1.4) of methanol water mixture feed and operating capacity of one tubular reactor array were discovered. At temperatures near 573 K it was found that the reformate gas does not require any purification/filtration to be supplied to a HT-PEMFC as the CO concentration in reformate gas was low (below 30000 ppm). The simulation work for understanding the effect of different operating condition(s) on the reformer performance generated design of experiment for investigation of the efforts carried out to evaluate, build and demonstrate a 0.25 kWe equivalent methanol reformer for HT-PEM fuel cell system.The paper discusses few of the important aspects on the experimental investigation of effect of operating conditions on methanol steam reformer design with packed bed configuration for hydrogen production. The basic investigation included the analysis of effect of design and operating parameters on the methanol conversion and quality of reformate gas generation (amount of CO). The investigation also covers the analysis of heat and mass transfer along with chemical reaction and generation of species to achieve optimum process parameters and system efficiency. These investigations led to finalise, the operating parameters and basic design philosophy of the packed bed tubular methanol steam reformer for 5 kWe HT-PEMFC system application.