III International Conference

PP-III-75OPTIMIZATION OF THE TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION IN THE METHANOLSTEAM REFORMERMakarshin L.L., Andreev D.V., Gribovskiy A.G., Hantakov R.M. 1 , Dutov P.M. 1 ,Parmon V.N.Boreskov Institute of Catalysis SB RAS, Novosibirsk, Russia1 Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, RussiaE-mail: gribovsk@catalysis.ruThe present work is aimed at studying the effect of microreactor design on the methanolsteam reforming (MSR) efficiency. Heat conduction coefficient of the corrugated brass andfoam nickel microchannel plates (MCP) depending on the MCP compression ratio wasmasured. Two microreactors with different schemes of MCP heat supply were studied.Microreactor with copper plates is two times more effective than microreactor without them.Microreactor with internal flat microelectroheaters can produce up to 140 l/h of hydrogen.Microchannel microreactors have many advantages compared to traditional fixed-bedreactors, including high heat and mass transfer rates and large surface-to-volume ratio. Thus,endothermic reaction of the MSR can be carried out more effectively in the microreactor. Thegoal of this work is to investigate the effect of microreactor design on the temperaturedistribution in the microreactor and the catalyst efficiency.The MCP heat conduction coefficient was measured at different temperatures by meansof special self-made setup using comparative approach [1]. As a result we received the heatconduction coefficient value of the corrugated brass and foam nickel MCP at 270 o C versusMCP compression ratio. Heat conduction coefficient of the foam nickel MCP depends onMCP compression ratio, but the MCP compression ratio does not affect the heat conductioncoefficient of the corrugated brass MCP. The heat conduction coefficient of the corrugatedbrass MCP is equal to 4.7 W/(m·K), that is twenty five times smaller than the heat conductioncoefficient of bulk brass.Our investigations of the MSR in the microreactors with hydrogen production more than50 l/h reveal that heat transfer limitations between MCP’s affect the MSR and reduce thehydrogen production. We studied two microreactors with different scheme of MCP heatsupply. Both microreactors were made of stainless steel. The Cu/Ce/Al catalyst [2] wasdeposited on MCP by the method described in [3].In the first microreactor we insert 2x3 mm corrugated brass MCP’s (cross-section ofchannels is 0.8x0.2 mm). To improve the heating 2 mm copper plates was placed after each610