Simulation of integrated purification systems for hydrogen production in the methanol steam reforming process

Recently, the use of clean energy has become an interesting topic for researchers, with hydrogen attracting the attention of researchers and industries as an alternative energy source. among existing hydrogen production sources, methanol fuel is considered an attractive feedstock for hydrogen production due to its advantages. however, the output stream from a methanol steam reforming reactor contains some carbon monoxide, and considering that carbon monoxide leads to fuel cell catalyst damage, its concentration needs to be reduced. the present work focuses on the design and simulation of a purification system for the methanol steam reforming process. therefore, in the present study, a prox unit was used to reduce the concentration of carbon monoxide output in the reformer. in this system, pt/al2o3 catalyst was first used to increase the reaction rate. then, aspen plus v11.0 software was used to simulate the prox system. subsequent results showed that carbon monoxide was completely removed from the system in the reactor. next, in order to increase the concentration of hydrogen, a pressure swing adsorption (psa) column, including an activated carbon absorber, was used as a purification system. simulation and design of the psa process were done in aspen adsorption v11.0 software. a hydrogen purity of 99.9915% was obtained in the output stream from the psa column. to validate the results obtained from the simulation, the present work was compared with the study of abdeljaoued et al. [30]. the study’s simulation results showed an acceptable error percentage with the results of that article.