Hydrogen Production from Ethanol Steam Reforming: Fixed Bed Reactor Design

P. GIUNTA, N. AMADEO, M. LABORDE

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL REACTOR ENGINEERING

The Berkeley Electronic Press

Año: 2008 vol. 6 p. 1 - 16

1542-6580

The aim of this work is to design an ethanol steam reformer to produce a hydrogen stream capable of feeding a 60 kW PEM fuel cell applying the plug flow model, considering the presence of the catalyst bed (heterogeneous model). The Dusty-Gas Model is employed for the catalyst, since it better predicts the fluxes of a multicomponent mixture. Moreover, this model has shown to be computationally more robust than the Fickian Model. A power law-type kinetics was used. Results showed that it is possible to carry out the ethanol steam reforming in a compact device (1.66 x 10 -5 to 5.27 x 10 -5 m3). It was also observed that this process is determined by heat transfer.