FUEL 91 |
| The steam methane reforming processes employed today in large-scale hydrogen facilities are capital intensive and operate far from theoretical efficiencies. Microchannel process technology offers a way to reduce the size and cost of reforming equipment and to substantially improve process efficiency. However, these advantages have yet to be proven at commercially significant production levels. While the transition from lab to industrial scale has been the failing of many promising technologies, recent developmental successes make the future of microchannel process technology appear especially encouraging. These include advancements in the areas of manifolding, cost effective manufacturing, and uniform catalyst deployment. Microchannel architecture improves both mass and heat transfer, which makes it ideal for many catalytic reactions, including highly endothermic reforming of natural gas. Microchannel devices are scaled up by numbering up. This means that capacity is increased by adding more and more parallel channels rather than changing critical process dimensions, such as tube or vessel diameters. The numbering up method of increasing scale reduces risk by keeping the reaction physics and channel flow hydrodynamics the same, but introduces its own challenges. This presentation will discuss recent successes in the area of reforming natural gas in microchannel reactors and the efforts to scale this technology to commercial capacity. |
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Advances in Hydrogen Production
1:30 PM-5:05 PM, Monday, 11 September 2006 Palace -- Marina Room, Oral
Division of Fuel Chemistry |