(417aa) Improvement of Sorption Enhanced Water Gas Reaction Performance By Using Multi-Section Packing Concept

Fossil fuels generate a variety of pollutant causing serious environmental problems during combustion. To overcome the drawbacks of using fossil fuels, hydrogen are considered as an alternative energy carrier which has an advantage of generating only water as a product. Hydrogen can be produced in many different ways. Among various techniques, water gas shift (WGS) reaction (CO + H₂O ↔ H₂ + CO₂) has been highlighted for an efficient method of mass hydrogen production. However, WGS reaction generates CO₂ as a by-product and additional separation processes are required, which increase the cost and degrade the efficiency of the entire process. Recently, sorption enhanced water gas shift (SE-WGS) reaction has been developed to solve this problem and to improve performance. In SE-WGS reaction, CO₂ generated from the WGS reaction is removed by using adsorbent simultaneously with reaction in a single reactor. However, the reactor temperature increases significantly due to the exothermic WGS reaction. The increased temperature may degrade catalyst and adsorbent, and eventually decrease the efficiency of sorption enhanced reaction. In this study, the temperature profile in the SE-WGS reactor is numerically simulated and a concept of multi-section packing is applied to alleviate temperature increase and to optimize the SE-WGS reaction performance.