Design and Experimental Study of a Milli-channel Vaporizer

The most common way to produce hydrogen at an industrial scale is, by far, the Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) process. The ever-growing interest about hydrogen as the fuel of the future has led to a redesign of the process for smaller production capacity. The intensification of the SMR process concerns different pieces of equipment such as the heat-exchanger reactor, the shift reactor or the vaporizer. In this paper, an intensified vaporizer is studied for the vaporization of water in 2 mm diameter channels with semi-circular cross section. The vaporizer is tested, and the effect of the various operating parameters (flowrates, temperatures and pressure) on the vapour quality produced is analysed.