Performance analysis of an autothermal membrane reactor for hydrogen production from methane

Abstract

An autothermal reforming reactor in which the couple of steam reforming with partial oxidation reforming carried out is studied for the production of hydrogen from methane. In the autothermal reforming reactor, the endothermic heat and part of the steam required for steam reforming are balanced by an exothermic oxidation. The autothermal reforming reactor is generally an adiabatic fixed-bed reactor in the presence of mixture of two different catalysts for partial oxidation and steam reforming reactions. However, with such a reactor configuration, the management of the heat integration of the two reactions is difficult. In this work, the performance of three different methane autothermal reforming reactors, i.e., a conventional reactor, a dual-bed reactor and membrane reactor is investigated by using a one-dimensional homogeneous and non-isothermal model. For the membrane reactor, different type of membrane, i.e., H[subscript 2]-selective membrane, O[subscript 2]-selective membrane and H[subscript 2]-O[subscript 2] selective membrane, is applied. Effect of various operating parameters on the efficiency of each reactor is evaluated in terms of methane conversion, H[subscript 2]/CO of product, hydrogen recovery yield and separation factor. Simulation results show that the H[subscript 2]-O[subscript 2] selective membrane reactor provides the best performance in terms of the increased methane conversion and the reduced hot spot problem.