Abstract
Automobile exhaust heat recovery is considered to be an effective means to enhance fuel utilization. The catalytic production of hydrogen by methanol steam reforming is an attractive option for onboard mobile applications, due to its many advantages. However, the reformers of conventional packed bed type suffer from axial temperature gradients and cold spots resulting from severe limitations of mass and heat transfer. These disadvantages limit reformers to a low efficiency of catalyst utilization. A novel rib microreactor was designed for the hydrogen production from methanol steam reforming heated by automobile exhaust, and the effect of inlet exhaust and methanol steam on reactor performance was numerically analyzed in detail, with computational fluid dynamics. The results showed that the best operating parameters were the counter flow, water-to-alcohol (W/A) of 1.3, exhaust inlet velocity of 1.1 m/s, and exhaust inlet temperature of 773 K, when the inlet velocity and inlet temperature of the reactant were 0.1 m/s and 493 K, respectively. At this condition, a methanol conversion of 99.4% and thermal efficiency of 28% were achieved, together with a hydrogen content of 69.6%.
Highlights
Motor vehicles are increasing dramatically with the rapid economic development [1,2]
As can be seen temperature of 673 K, the characteristics of the methanol steam reforming (MSR) are shown as figures when the inlet exhaust from velocity the figure, the temperature, conversion, the the hydrogen moledistribution, fraction along the axis increases from 0.3 m/s tomethanol
A rib microreactor for MSR heated by automobile exhaust was designed to study the effects of inlet exhaust and methanol steam on the reactor performance
Summary
Motor vehicles are increasing dramatically with the rapid economic development [1,2]. The exhaust heat recovery, which is very important to improve the fuel efficiency, attracts more and more attention [5,6]. The greenhouse effect resulting from the burning of fossil energy has seriously affected the earth. In this regard, many countries are actively investing in the development of pollution-free clean energy and alternative energy [8,9,10]. Hydrogen is one of the prominent alternative energy because of its many excellent properties, especially its combustion product of water [11,12]
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