Characteristics of Temperature in Reformer Tube and Chemical Reaction for Steam Methane Ratio

Abstract

-The aim of numerical study is the investigation of the solid and fluid temperatures in a reformer tube and chemical reaction characteristics of different steam-carbon ratio. We considered conjugate heat transfer contain radiation, convection and conductive heat transfers. This is because steam reforming reaction of hydrocarbon occurred high temperature conditions up to 800 K-1000 K by using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code (Fluent ver. 13.0). For numerical simulation, the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes, momentum and energy equation were employed. In addition, inside of reformer tube is assumed as the porous medium to consider the Nichrome-based catalyst. To analysis characteristics of tube temperature in chemical reaction, we changed steam-methane ratio(SCR) from 1 to 6. As increased SCR, the higher tube temperature and methane conversion were observed. It was obtained that the highest hydrogen production held in SCR of 5.