One-Body Hybrid Solid Packing for Sorption-Enhanced Water Gas Shift Reaction

The interest in hydrogen , regarded as a new clean energy carrier , has been increasing with the expectation for the upcoming hydrogen economy. In the hydrogen economy , hydrogen can replace the conventional fuels which have caused pollution problems. As one of the methods for mass production of hydrogen , water gas shift (WGS) reaction (CO + H2O ↔ H2 + CO2) has been highlighted for the synthesis gas feed which is produced from coal gasification. Recently , the performance of WGS reaction is significantly increased by applying the sorption-enhanced WGS reaction (SE-WGS) concept , where WGS reaction and CO2 sorption are carried out simultaneously. High-purity hydrogen can be directly produced through SE-WGS without further purification processes. In the SE-WGS reaction , the uniform packing of catalyst and sorbent is important , however that is difficult to manage with conventional catalyst and sorbent pellets. In this study , novel one-body hybrid solid pellets consisting of the mixture of catalyst and sorbent were prepared to overcome this drawback , and applied to SE-WGS reaction. From experiments , the effect of different ratio of sorbent/catalyst in one-body hybrid solid pellets was studied. A novel multi-section packing concept was also applied to SE-WGS with one-body hybrid solid pellets. The experimental results showed that more high-purity hydrogen could be produced when more catalyst was packed in the first section and more sorbent in the second section.