Session: 03-06 Design for sustainability

Paper Number: 125320

125320 - On the Design of a Scaled-Up Pulsed Methane Pyrolysis Reactor for Clean Hydrogen Production 

In a global hydrogen market rapidly growing to satisfy the requests driven by a Net Zero economy, new solutions for clean and cheap H2 production are needed. Ekona has developed a pulsed methane pyrolysis (PMP) hydrogen production system based on a constant volume, combustion-driven process. The PMP reactor is non-catalytic and low-cost and mitigates carbon fouling typical of other methane pyrolysis reactor platforms as proved by the 200 kg of H2/day prototype. A scale-up procedure is on-going to meet the needs of actual applications typically orders of magnitude larger this initial Pilot Plant size.

Current paper is describing the analytic (CFD) work performed to enlarge the current reactor and combustors, leveraging the Lessons Learned, up to 20x size. Since the process cycle is quite long (1 Hz) and complex, the CFD study was broken into three different sections dedicated respectively to: 1) Combustor Mixing, Filling and Purging, 2) Simulated Hot Products Injection into the Reactor, 3) Reactor Filing and Venting and Interaction with concurrent Combustor Activities. Despite sharing a similar numerical method based on transient multispecies CFD simulations with moving meshes exploiting the overset mesh approach to model the valve movement, each section focuses on differ part of the cycle (in time) and different part of the reactor (in space).

Several geometry variants are tested and ranked in their performance for: providing uniform CH4/O2 mixing and a nearly 1D plug flow filling in the combustor, generating an adequate mixing between combustion products and feedstock to rise uniformly pressure and temperature up to pre-pyrolysis conditions, generating minimal flow anomalies in the reactor to permit smooth filling and venting alongside the interaction with the combustor flow.

Presenting Author: Cosimo Bianchini Ergon Research

Presenting Author Biography: Cosimo Bianchini is executive at Ergon Research where he has been working for 11 years as CFD specialist and Engineering manager. His principal expertise is in the area of computational methods for aerodynamics and heat transfer in turbomachinery. He obtained a PhD in 2011 from the University of Florence with a thesis on advanced boundary conditions for CFD analysis of heat transfer and aeroacoustics.

Authors:

Cosimo Bianchini Ergon Research
Riccardo Da Soghe Ergon Research
Davide Bertini Ergon Research
Donald Kendrick EKONA
Scott Gray EKONA
John Hinkey Geminus TD
Michael J. Aarnio Geminus TD
Roberto Meloni Baker Hughes