Design Aspects of Hybrid Adsorbent-Membrane Reactors for Hydrogen Production

We present a detailed investigation of the design characteristics and performance of a novel reactor system, termed the hybrid adsorbent-membrane reactor (HAMR), for hydrogen production. The HAMR concept, originally proposed by our group 1,2 for esterification reactions, couples the reaction and membrane separation steps with adsorption on the membrane feed or permeate side. The HAMR system investigated previously involved a hybrid pervaporation membrane reactor and integrated the reaction and pervaporation steps through a membrane with water adsorption. Coupling reaction, pervaporation, and adsorption significantly improved the performance. In this paper, we investigate a new HAMR system involving a hybrid packed-bed catalytic membrane reactor coupling the methane-steam-reforming reaction through a porous ceramic membrane with a CO 2 adsorption system. The present HAMR system is of potential interest to pure hydrogen production for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells for various mobile and stationary applications. The reactor characteristics have been investigated for a range of temperature and pressure conditions relevant to the aforementioned applications. The HAMR system exhibits enhanced methane conversion, hydrogen yield, and product purity and shows good promise for reducing the hostile operating conditions of conventional methane-steam reformers and for meeting the product purity requirements for PEM operation.