Investigations into the Evaporation Efficiency and Hydrogen Production Rate of Methanol-Water Fuels in a Steam Reformer Tube

ABSTRACT

The present study considers a tubular reformer packed with CuO/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst and heater tubes. Five different fuels are considered, namely four methanol-water fuels with molar ratios of 40%:60%, 50%:50%, 62%:38%, 75%:25%, and pure methanol fuel. For the methanol-water fuels with methanol molar fractions of 40, 50 and 62%, respectively, the temperature reaches a minimum value after approximately 0.22 m. Furthermore, the methanol mass fraction conversion rate exceeds 98%. The hydrogen mass fraction increases with an increasing methanol molar fraction and has a value of approximately 13.43% given an input fuel with a methanol molar ratio of 62%:38%. For the fuels with methanol molar fractions of 75 and 100%, respectively, the methanol mass conversation rate reduces to around 66.57 and 22.72%, respectively. As a result, the hydrogen mass fraction has values of just 6.85 and 1.42%, respectively. In other words, for the inlet temperature, velocity and pressure conditions considered, the reaction efficiency is degraded for methanol-water fuels with higher methanol content, and hence the hydrogen production efficiency is reducing.

KEYWORDS:

• Methanol steam reforming
• catalyst
• methanol-water
• hydrogen generation rate
• hydrogen production efficiency

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this study by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under Contract No. MOST 106-2221-E-024-010.