Hydrodynamics of a Novel Design Circulating Fluidized Bed Steam Reformer Operating in the Dense Suspension Upflow Regime

Circulating fluidized bed steam reformers (CFBSR) represent an important alternative for hydrogen production, a promising energy carrier. Although the reactor hydrodynamics play crucial role, modeling efforts to date are limited to one-dimensional models, thus ignoring many of the flow characteristics of fluidized beds that have strong effects on the reactor efficiency. The flow inside the riser is inherently complex and requires at least two-dimensional modeling to capture its details. In the present work, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the hydrodynamics of the riser part of a novel CFBSR were carried out using two-phase Eulerian-Eulerian approach coupled with kinetic theory of granular flow and K-ε model. Cold flow simulations were carried under different fluidization regimes. It was found that catalyst of Geldart's type “A” particle is more efficient for flow inside the catalytic reactor and dense suspension upflow (DSU) fluidization regime yields the best homogeneous catalyst distribution in the riser and thus best reactor performance. The optimum range for catalyst flux was found to be higher than 1150 kg/m2·s for a gas flux of 6.78 kg/m2·s. It was also noted that the value of 500 Kg/m2·s for catalyst flux represents the critical value below which the riser will operate under pneumatic transport regime.