Oxidative Reforming of Benzene for the Hydrogen Production Post-Combustion in a Catalytic Membrane Reactor

Hydrogen is an important material for the chemical, petrochemical and petroleum refining industries and it is a clean fuel that can be used in fuel cells and internal combustion engines. The main processes for the production hydrogen are currently the catalytic reforming of methane, catalytic reforming of toluene, catalytic reforming of benzene, partial oxidation of heavy oil residues, biomass and coal gasification. In the present study an one-dimensional dynamic non-isothermal model has been developed to simulate the catalytic reforming of benzene to procedure hydrogen. A catalytic membrane reactor (CMR) was used to study the reforming process of benzene. The CMR has been modelled for the reaction zone in order to develop the energy balance equations of the gaseous (T_g) and solid (T_s) phases as well as material balances of the chemical components (C₆H₆, H₂O, CO, H₂, CH₄, CO₂). The energy balance equations as well as the chemical component equations have been formed by a partial differential equation (PDE) system. The method of lines was employed to convert the PDE set into an ordinary differential equation (ODE) system using finite difference approximation of the spatial derivatives. First-order backward difference was used to approximate the convection terms and second-order central difference to approximate the diffusion terms. Additionally, the EDO system has been solved by the Runge-Kutta Gill method with respect to time. This work has as objective the hydrogen production. So, we have been performed a sensitivity analysis in relation to H₂ and CO using as test the input flow (Q_g) of the gas phase to check the production between H₂ and CO by comparison. Results shown an increase for H₂ when the Q_g is increasing.