application of cfd in modeling of industrial natural gas reformers for syngas production

Main syngas and hydrogen in refineries, petrochemical complexes and steal companies produce using industrial steam reformers. these reformers use natural gas as a feedstock that mainly contains methane. modeling the reformer using the computational fluid dynamic (cfd) approach faces some challenges because of the complexity of heterogenous packed bed reactors with large temperature gradients. in this review, recent development in the cfd modeling of methane steam reforming (msr) on the industrial scale was summarized. for cfd modeling the industrial reformers, there are two tactics. first, a general porous media approach was used to simplified the heterogeneous catalyst and reduce the computation. second, for some segments of a reformer tube or small size tubes, a particle resolved approach with limited numbers of catalyst pellets was introduced and a random packing approach and detailed thermal radiation models were added to it. the catalyst porous media approach is an approximation method that can be used for modeling the whole reformer tubes but the particleresolved approach is a more accurate model that is limited to some parts of the industrial tube. because it needs a very high computation processing effort. validations of the cfd results by experimental tests were limited to some temperatures along the reactor length and compositions at the exit of the reformer because of the difficulty of the measurements at the operating condition of msr. in these researches, most of the recent cfd case studies that were used for modeling the industrial steam reformers were reviewed and the main findings were discussed briefly.