Numerical studies on heat coupling and configuration optimization in an industrial hydrogen production reformer

Steam methane reforming furnaces are the most important devices in the hydrogen production industry. The highly endothermic reaction system requires reaction tubes in the furnace to have a large heat transfer area and to be operated under high temperature and pressure conditions. In order to enhance heat transfer efficiency and protect reaction tubes, the controlling and optimization of the furnace structure have increasingly received more and more research attention. As known from the furnace structure, it is essential to couple the exothermic combustion with the endothermic reforming reactions due to the highly interactive nature of the two processes. Thus, in this paper, the combustion process in the furnace was numerically studied by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model the combustion chamber, coupled with methane steam reforming reaction inside the reaction tubes, defined by a plug flow model. A set of combustion models were compared for the furnace chamber and a plug flow reaction model was employed for reforming reaction tubes, and then a heat coupling process was established. The predicted flue gas temperature distribution showed that the heat transfer in the furnace was not uniform, resulting in hot spots and heat losses on the tube wall. Therefore, structure optimization schemes were proposed. Optimization on arrangements of the tubes and the nozzles promoted the uniform distribution of flue-gas temperature and then improved heat transfer efficiency, thereby enhancing performance of the steam reforming process.