(487d) One-Body Hybrid Solid Packing for Sorption-Enhanced Water Gas Shift Reaction

The interest in hydrogen, regarded as a new clean energy carrier, has been increasing with the expectation for the upcoming hydrogen economy. In the hydrogen economy, hydrogen can replace the conventional fuels which have caused pollution problems. As one of the methods for mass production of hydrogen, water gas shift (WGS) reaction (CO + H₂O ↔ H₂ + CO₂) has been highlighted for the synthesis gas feed which is produced from coal gasification. Recently, the performance of WGS reaction is significantly increased by applying the sorption-enhanced WGS reaction (SE-WGS) concept, where WGS reaction and CO₂ sorption are carried out simultaneously. High-purity hydrogen can be directly produced through SE-WGS without further purification processes. In the SE-WGS reaction, the uniform packing of catalyst and sorbent is important, however that is difficult to manage with conventional catalyst and sorbent pellets. In this study, novel one-body hybrid solid pellets consisting of the mixture of catalyst and sorbent were prepared to overcome this drawback, and applied to SE-WGS reaction. From experiments, the effect of different ratio of sorbent/catalyst in one-body hybrid solid pellets was studied. A novel multi-section packing concept was also applied to SE-WGS with one-body hybrid solid pellets. The experimental results showed that more high-purity hydrogen could be produced when more catalyst was packed in the first section and more sorbent in the second section.