Intensification of methane steam reforming by Cu-foams packed with Rh-Al2O3 catalyst: A pilot-scale assessment

Efficient heat transfer is a crucial factor in the design of compact methane steam reformers for distributed hydrogen networks. The adoption of copper packed foams was proposed and demonstrated at lab-scale by our group to strongly intensify heat transfer in these systems. Moreover, a 2D heterogeneous model of the packed-foam reformer was developed and validated against experimental data. In this work, an existing pilot-scale annular methane steam reformer (with maximum inlet methane flow rate equal to 3 Nm3/h) was successfully loaded to work with the innovative concept: comparative runs with conventional packed bed layout were performed on the same reactor keeping the same catalyst formulation and load. The advantage of packed foam configuration was demonstrated by lower radial temperature gradients and considerably higher methane conversions. Upon increasing by three times the feed methane flow rate with respect to the packed bed, the copper internals still enabled almost full methane conversion due to the enhanced heat transfer. Adapting the mathematical model to the reactor configuration, a good correspondence between radial temperature difference and methane conversion from experimental and simulation results was observed. The scalability of the packed foam concept to the industrial scale is here demonstrated, including simple procedures for loading and unloading of the reactor tubes.