(501c) Modeling and Simulations of Methane Steam Reforming in Thermally Coupled Plate Type Membrane Reactor

Thermally coupled monolith reactor has the advantage that they can be very compact and they allow significant heat transfer by reducing heat transfer resistance to a minimum. Modelling and performance analysis of such reactor is absolutely essential before experimental verification because the catalyst arrangment in such thrmally coupled reactor makes it impractical to perform experiments with reactor to get best design and operating parameters without having idea about reactor performance. A model for plate type methane steam reformer with membrane is presented. The reactor contains three channels. Endothermic steam reforming reaction is coupled with burner in which exothermic catalytic reaction of combustion of methane takes place. Steam reformer and burner are modeled as plate type monolith reactors. Hydrogen is removed simultaneously from reformer by palladium membrane. Pressure inside burner and steam reformer is assumed to be constant. Heat transfer and mass transfer coefficients for burner and reformer are modeled using suitable correlations. Concentration and temperature dependence of viscosity and diffusivity is incorporated in both burner and reformer model for better accuracy. Resulting 25 partial differential equations(with time domain) are discretized spatially using spline collocation method on finite element and solved numerically for cocurrent and countercurrent flow mode of sweep gas. Based on simulation results, hydrogen recovery yield and wall temperature are analysed for different operating parameters for both flow modes. Since the model equations are dynamic in nature, simulation results also gives insight into dynamic behaviour of system which is helpful in framing suitable control strategy.