Size effect and series-parallel integration design of laminated methanol steam reforming microreactor for hydrogen production

摘要

To realize the integration and amplification of microreactors, this paper chose the methanol steam reforming microreactor for hydrogen production as the research object and adopted copper foam as the catalyst support. Three types of microreactors were designed with different structure sizes (small [S-type], medium [M-type], and large [L-type]), and reaction units were assembled in series and in parallel. The reaction performance of the methanol steam reforming microreactor was studied by varying the gas hourly space velocity (GHSV) and reaction temperature. Results show that the structure size had a large influence on the reaction performance of microreactor. The S-type and M-type micro reactors exhibited better reaction performance for hydrogen production, whereas the L-type microreactor had lower reaction performance (methanol conversion decreased by 7.5% and the H-2 flow rate decreased by 8.3% compared to the S-type microreactor). The series and parallel assembly methods also demonstrated a clear influence on the reaction performance of the microreactor for hydrogen production. The methanol conversion and H-2 flow rate of the series-assembled microreactor decreased clearly, whereas the methanol conversion of the parallel-assembled microreactor changed negligibly. The H-2 flow rate of microreactor was exponentially increased by the number of reaction units, and basically no amplification effect existed, making it suitable for integrated amplification of microreactors. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.