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Hydrogen Unit Reformer

reformer

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#1 singh711

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Posted 24 November 2013 - 08:53 PM

I am a university student with operation experience of 6 years. I am designing a Hydrogen Unit for school and has finished the material and heat balance on the unit. The design was considered to be the best out of class. Now, I have to size each equipment for the final presentation. I have designed most of the equipment except Reformer, PreReformer, and PSA. 

 

For Reformer: I could have used PFR equation to find volume but no catalyst is given. I have used the heat flu to calculate the surface area and tube numbers for 100MM SCFD H2 production. Anyone has any info on Total Reformer size and tube sizing please?

 

PSA: I can not have slight idea where to start with Pressure Adsorption Unit size. I would appreciate if anybody has info on that. 

 

PreReformer: Converts higher hydrocarbons completely but I do not know how to size it. I have seen alot of members have done the same research but nobody never uploaded anything. 

 

I have used the search button and did not find what I was looking for. 

 

Can somebody please upload any excel sheet regarding any of these equipments?

 

By reformer heat flux..i was able to calculate 240 5inch tubes 45 ft long..I am not sure how good that number is since Overall heat Transfer was an Average.

 

Thank you. 



#2 clarkr3000

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Posted 06 December 2013 - 05:05 AM

For this information you need to talk to a catalyst supplier. Try Sud Chemie. If you are going to buy the catalyst from them they will tell you the residence time you will need. You have to know something about the kinetics and no one is going to do that for you for free. You may be able to get estimates from some published research papers but folks tend to keep this information pretty close to themselves. Same goes for Molecular Sieve material and isotherms for PSA units.


Edited by clarkr3000, 06 December 2013 - 05:08 AM.


#3 thorium90

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Posted 06 December 2013 - 06:10 AM

For a simple school project regarding an extremely common topic, hydrogen production by steam reforming, you won't need to search catalyst suppliers, assuming they are kind enough to give out free data on their catalysts..
The research by Xu and Froment (1989) into these catalysts are widely used as well as the more recent ones by Hou and Hughes (2001). There are many other papers apart from the two I mentioned.
 
As for the PSA, a simple LDF model should suffice.
 
The size of the prereformer depends on how much higher hydrocarbons there are in your feed.
 
Heat flux is the rate of heat transfer. Heat flux would tell you the tube length you need, not the number of tubes you need. The value wont be a constant over the length of the tube. I think what you meant was heat duty..

Edited by thorium90, 06 December 2013 - 06:46 AM.





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