A Palladium-based Membrane Autothermal Reactor Design, Analysis, Comparison And Optimization For Hydrogen Production

Hydrogen, a clean energy carrier, is an ideal alternative for solving the shortageof fossil fuel as well as the increasingly crucial environmental issue. Inorganicmembrane reactor especially hydrogen permeable membrane reactor can play animportant role in hydrogen production since it has excellent hydrogen permeation fluxand selectivity which can drive the reforming reaction equilibrium shift forwardboosting the hydrogen production. We first did the literature survey to fullyunderstand the current situation of this domain and gathered wealth of informationand experience which is essential for us to present the new type of membrane reactor–Pd membrane autothermal reactor (PMATR).A1-D shell-tube pattern is adopted for our simulation. The governing equations,membrane permeation equation, kinetics and thermodynamics data, species properties,correlations and mixing rules are programed and solved by MATLAB. The basicreactor behavior including the effect of with or without combustion catalyst andbaseline condition simulation as well as parametric simulation. To better investigatethe advantages and disadvantages we take the comparison of PMATR andconventional autothermal reactor (CATR) by comparing the optimization hydrogenrecovery under different operating conditions. Finally, a updated PMATR, multi-tubePMATR is proposed to deal with the temperature issue.The simulation results reveal that it is hazardous to operate without combustioncatalyst, while by adopting catalyst could smooth the temperature control as well asincrease the productivity. Inlet temperature and air/carbon will affect the reactortemperature, while pressure, methane feed flow rate and steam/carbon can affect thehydrogen partial pressure difference, hence, influencing the reactor performance. Theselection of air/carbon, in particular, influences the hydrogen recovery significantly.Low air/carbon cannot provide sufficient heat while high air/carbon will consumeextra hydrogen leading to low recovery. The comparison results indicates that thePMATR has big advantage over CATR in terms of hydrogen production. The updatedmulti-tube PMATR can effectively reduce the reactor temperature, however, itrequires large membrane area.