Process Development for Hydrogen Production via Water-Gas Shift Reaction Using Aspen HYSYS

Abstract

The development of a process for the production of hydrogen through water-gas shift reaction has been developed and simulated in this work using Aspen HYSYS. This was achieved by picking the pieces of process equipment of the plant from the appropriate section of the Aspen HYSYS environment and connecting them together through appropriate streams. In addition, the components involved in the process were selected from the Aspen HYSYS databank. Peng-Robinson Stryjek-Vera (PRSV) was used as the fluid package of the developed process for property estimation during the simulation. The reaction of the process was modelled as an equilibrium type, the equilibrium constant of which was estimated using Gibbs Free Energy. From the results obtained, it has been established that pure hydrogen can be obtained from a plant comprising of a mixer, a reactor (with approximately 80.07% conversion of the reactants), a separator and two heat exchangers based on the fact that the mole fraction, the mass fraction and the volume fraction of hydrogen obtained from the simulation carried out when carbon monoxide and steam were passed into the process plant at room temperature (25 °C) and boiling temperature of water (100 °C), respectively under atmospheric pressure was approximately 1.

Simulation And Optimization Of Hydrogen Production By Steam Reforming Of Natural Gas

“…The purpose of this measure was to avoid the pre-purification step of the main stream hence, to save on the capital & operation costs. Moreover, the steam reforming reactions of all the natural gas components (Rxn6-Rxn12), were taken into consideration in the stoichiometric approach in order to maximize the calculation accuracy (Olateju et al, 2017). The average natural gas components in the hydrogen production unit plant layout are provided in Table 1 In this perspective, the stoichiometric natural gas quantity required to produce 3,524,275 MT/year and found to be 402.2 Kg/h.…”

“…Natural gas and steam were mixed and heated before being fed to a Gibbs reforming reactor. Conventional steam reforming reactors use Ni-based catalysts between 10 and 20 wt% on a-Al2O3, calcium, or magnesium aluminate with a typical lifetime of 3-5 years due to the low cost of nickel, its wide availability, and sufficient catalytic activity (Olateju, et al, 2017). Then, the head headstreams reformer is cooled down in cooler E-101 and fed to a water gas shift (WGS) Gibbs reactor generally operating with a copper-based catalyst (Vozniuk et al, 2019).…”

Refinery Off-Gas as Feed to a Hydrogen Production Facility: Performance Lifting of the Steam Reforming Technique

“…There are three principal techniques used to produce H 2 from hydrocarbon fuels (El-Shafie et al, 2019;Walden, 2022): namely, steam-methane reforming (SMR), autothermal reforming, and partial oxidation. Among them, SMR is the best way to go based on the following reasons: it has the highest H 2 yield of all reforming strategies, it is currently the simplest and least expensive method of H 2 production, it has the highest efficiency (65-70%), it is the safest due to the lower operating temperature of the SMR technique, and cumulatively, its disadvantages are easier to overlook or address (Holladay et al, 2009;Olateju et al, 2017). Other techniques of separating H 2 from refinery off-gas, like pressure swing adsorption (PSA), membrane separation (MS), and cryogenic distillation (CD), are vividly explained in the literature, where cost and purity of the product recovery (i.e., H 2 ) are two major factors that must be considered in choosing a particular technique (Benson & Celin, 2018;Faraji et al, 2005;Hussain, 2023;Key & Malik, 2010;Mehra, 1988;Mperiju et al, 2023).…”

Systematic Approach for Synthesizing Carbon–Hydrogen–Oxygen Networks Involving Detailed Process Simulations

“…The conditions in the reactor are set at 470 °C and 1.1 bar, and the ratio CO/H 2 O ≈ 0.8. 52 Carbonylation of Methanol to Acetic Acid. The chemistry of this process is complex and forms various byproducts; the overall reaction is given as follows…”

“…The reversible reaction known as the water gas shift reaction is used to convert CO from a steam methane reforming reaction into additional hydrogen. The conditions in the reactor are set at 470 °C and 1.1 bar, and the ratio CO/H 2 O ≈ 0.8 …”