THEORETICAL STUDY ON THE PRODUCTION OF SYNTHESIS GAS IN MEMBRANE REACTOR

Abstract

Climate change is one of the serious problems, facing the world today. Its impact is being felt across the world as temperature increase, draught, flooding etc. One of the main reasons of climate changing is global warming and for global warming, greenhouse effect is the cause. -Some-of atmospheric gases, e.g. carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, nitrous oxide, CFC's are claimed to be the "Greenhouse gases" which are responsible for the greenhouse effect. In above listed gases, carbon dioxide and methane contribute about three quarter of the total effect. A number of strategies have been proposed to consume carbon dioxide and methane to reduce the concentrations of these gases in atmosphere to protect our climate, as much as we can. In the present study, we proposed the CO2 consumption via a chemical reaction with methane, which is known as "Dry reforming" or CO2 reforming. Dry reforming is one of the promising methods to migrate the greenhouse effect. Further, the products of this reaction (Dry reforming), that are CO and H2, can be used for Fischer- Tropsch synthesis, and production of methanol, ammonia production, acetic acid, alcohols, gasoline, and other useful products, as valuable for industrial feed stocks. It is noteworthy that this reaction is consuming the greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) and giving the final valuable products, as well. In dry reforming, the reaction is limited by the equilibrium constraints. So, in order to increase the conversion of reactants, it is necessary to remove at least one of the products from the reaction system continuously, as soon as they formed, so that the equilibrium can be shifted to yield more products. In this regard, a membrane reactor enhances the yield of products by selectively removing the products from the reaction zone to the other side of the reactor. In the present work, a one dimensional steady state mathematical model of membrane reactor, for isothermal conditions, has been developed that comprises twelve ordinary differential equations along with reaction kinetics. The model equations have been solved for mentioned operating and boundary conditions by using ODE solver in MATLAB- 7. In the present study, the traditional reactor is also compared with iii membrane reactor for the same reaction system. In the view of simulation results, it has been concluded that membrane reactor is showing better performance with respect to traditional reactor at any temperature. In addition, the effect of various parameters on the performance of membrane reactor has been studied.