Simultaneous Increase of H2 and Gasoline Production by Optimizing Thermally Coupled Methanol Steam Reforming with Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis

Journal article, 2018

The worldwide growing of gaseous pollutions amount has attracted a great deal of attention for development of clean energy resources like hydrogen. Recently, methanol steam reforming (MSR) has been considered as an effective method for hydrogen production compared to other fuels for reforming. Indeed, advantages of methanol such as its good accessibility and properties like its low boiling point and low probability of coke formation as well as high hydrogen to carbon ratio encourage utilizing this substance in reforming process. Therefore, in this work, MSR as an endothermic reaction has been innovatively coupled with Fischer-Tropsch (FT) exothermic synthesis in order to enhance the yield of hydrogen and gasoline production. Presence of membrane in the proposed thermally coupled membrane reactor (TCMR) promotes H2 separation as the desired product. A homogeneous one-dimensional steady- state model was considered in the present work. Differential evolution (DE) optimization technique was used to optimize feed molar flow rates and inlet temperatures in both endothermic and exothermic reaction sides with the aim of maximizing gasoline and H2 yields (in both sides). Results show 42.1 % increase in gasoline yield production and simultaneously high H2 production yield of 68.5 % in exothermic side compared with the industrial FT reactor that is considered as conventional reactor (CR). Moreover, the suggested configuration can be considered as an energy and cost effective strategy as a result of supplying required energy for endothermic section by generated heat in the exothermic side.