Yuefa Wang

A turbulent Eulerian multi-fluid reactive flow model and its application in modelling sorption enhanced steam methane reforming

A turbulent multi-fluid reactive fluid model is presented in the paper, which is a combination of a kinetic theory granular flow multi-fluid model(Chao et al., 2011) and the reaction kinetics description(Lindborg, 2008). A two dimensional in-house code was developed to simulate the gas-catalyst-sorbent three-phase reactive flow in the sorption enhanced steam methane reforming fluidized bed reactor. In the simulation, Ca-based sorbents and Ni/MgAl2O3 catalysts are used. The simulation results show that a high production of hydrogen in SE-SMR is obtained compared with the conventional SMR process. The increase of the gas fluidization velocity does not affect the purity of the product hydrogen apparently,while it can shorten the time to get to the breakthrough apparently. The increase of the steam/carbon ratio can increase the purity of the product hydrogen. A homogeneous gas temperature distribution is found which is due to the gas, particle turbulent flows and the heat balance of the SMR-CO2 adsorption reactions. These simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental results from Johnsen et al. (2006a).