Hydrogen production from ethanol steam reforming. Fixed bed reactor design

P. GIUNTA, N. AMADEO, M. LABORDE

Bilbao, España

Conferencia; Chemical Reaction Engineering XI: Green Chemical Reactor Engineering; 2007

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 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 10-5 to 5.27 10-5 m3). It was also observed that this process is determined by heat transfer.