―RIGOROUS MODELING STUDY OF METHANE STEAM REFORMING IN CATALYTIC MEMBRANE REACTOR

Abstract

Our Modern day economy is completely dependent on fossil fuels directly or indirectly. Be it agriculture, industries, transportation or domestic needs, primarily fossil fuels cater to our energy needs. It’s a fairly known fact that our reserves of fossil fuels are depleting soon. Along with the diminishing fossil fuels, concerns over the environmental impact of fossil fuels are growing. Rise in global average temperature, reduction in snow covered area of the earth and rise in average sea level are some of the serious impacts of high amount of fossil fuels usage. To fulfill our energy demand hydrogen provides an alternative pathway which is environmentally innocuous. Not only combustion of hydrogen is environment friendly, its heat of combustion is also very high. Methane steam reforming is currently the most widely used industrial process to produce hydrogen on the large scale. Membrane technology integrated with conventional reforming process increases the conversion and makes it possible to operate the reactor at a significantly lower temperature as compared to Traditional reactors. In the present study, Methane steam reforming in catalytic membrane reformer has been studied theoretically. One dimensional isothermal, one dimensional nonisothermal and two dimensional models are developed for both membrane and traditional reactors to comparatively study their performance. Mathematical model consists of set of ordinary differential equations for one dimensional modeling and set of ordinary differential & partial differential equations for two dimensional modeling. Simulations have been carried out in MATLAB R2010b.