Design concepts of a scaled-down autothermal membrane reformer for on board hydrogen production

Multi‐fuel scaled‐down autothermal pure H2 generator: Design and proof of concept

“…This obviously requires a perfectly insulated system. Even for an insulated system water vaporization and effluent heating will result in at least 20% efficiency drop (see further discussion in Patrascu and Sheintuch).…”

“…This system with eight membrane tubes will have a size of ∼1.3 L. However, the membranes’ cross section area will occupy merely 3% of the total SR compartment area. It is reasonable to set the membranes’ partial area to 15% of the total reaction chamber; recall that performance is controlled by membrane permeation and not by catalytic activity (the oxidation chamber also take ∼15% of the total cross section area). Thus it should be possible to obtain at least 1.5 kW from the 1.3 L system by using 40 such membranes, with a total membrane area of 0.1 m 2 .…”

“…The reactor design is based on conceptual guidelines reported previously, and constructed as a shell and tube architecture, Figure . The components technical details are given in Table .…”

“…We previously derived and analyzed the one‐dimensional (1‐D) model for the proposed autothermal system, and investigated the system's behavior in terms of thermal efficiency and power output (production rate) . The model is composed of time‐dependent heat and components balances, all generally expressed in Eq.…”

“…The autothermal system design suggested here, couples membrane reactor for atmospheric pressure H 2 production by SR with a MO x reactor as the heat source . The design incorporates full recycle of the SR effluents and their mixing with air before entering the MO x compartment, to achieve auto‐thermal behavior with highest thermal efficiency.…”