Abstract

Study of methanol steam reforming kinetics on BASF-V1766 commercial catalyst

Author(s): M.Dehghani Mobarake, M.Bahmani, J.Towfighi Darian, M.Nouri

High purity hydrogen production is an integral part of a modern fuel cell package. Steam reforming of methanol has become commercially viable process fro hydrogen production. Experiments have been carried out to study the kinetics of the methanol steam reforming over a commercial catalyst BASF V1766 containing 50%(wt) CuO and 30%(wt) ZnO in an integral reactor under conditions of no diffusion limitation. Preliminary experiments were carried out to obtain the catalyst size and feed space velocities for exclision of mass and heat transfer resistances. The experiments demonstrated that both H2 and CO2 are formed as primary products, and the rate of methane disappearance is proportional to the partial pressure of methanol, H2 and CO2 even at low product concentrations. In all experiments carried out there was no CO formation and thus CO2 selectivity is 100%in the range of 523.15 to 583.15K. The following power law kinetic expression for the reforming reactions was developed and parameters were obtained by nonlinear regression fit to the experimental data. 0.05 CO 0.22 H 0.42 H O 59 . 0M MeOH 0 eOH 2 2 2 )P P P P RT E r k exp(      The kinetic model developed was compared with previous works and the difference in the amount of Cu/Zn in the catalyst was a contributory factor to the observed differences between the present and previous studies.