Abstract
In this work, the possibility of applying periodic operation to a membrane reactor for methane steam reforming was investigated by numerical simulations. The periodic operation considered was the modulation of reactor wall temperature, which was varied along the reactor axis and remained unchanged with respect to time. Three types of the wall temperature variation, namely sinusoidally continuous modulation, step change modulation and partial adiabatic operation, were considered and the corresponding reactor performances in terms of hydrogen production rate were compared. It was found that the hydrogen production rate could be enhanced by the proper wall temperature modulation compared to that obtained by operating the reactor at constant wall temperature under the conditions studied. The partial adiabatic operation showed the best performance among the three types of temperature modulations.
