Comparative study of two steam reforming kinetic models for pure hydrogen production from ethanol in a separating reactor

Abstract

The present work deal with a comparative study of two kinetics models of ethanol conversion by steam reforming for pure hydrogen generation in a Pd-Ag based membrane reactor. For this purpose, a mathematical model describing the reaction and separation phenomena that take place simultaneously in the membrane reactor was developed. The numerical solution of the set of differential equations constituting the obtained model allows us to quantify the process performance over both and catalysts. According to the obtained results, it was found that the performance of the ethanol steam reforming process depends strongly on the catalyst nature. In addition, the process's strongly sensitive to the used operating conditions, especially hydrogen partial pressure in permeate and in reaction sides, in which a good correlation and a synergistic effect between these parameters could be established. Under the optimal operating conditions, the quantity of hydrogen recovered when using the is three times greater than that obtained by using the catalyst.

Keywords

• membrane reactor
• hydrogen production
• pure hydrogen recovery
• ethanol conversion
• steam reforming
• nickel based catalysts