Abstract
The developments of hydrogen production equipment using inorganic membrane have been conducted to separate hydrogen from feed gas. A reactor vessel had been used for the purification of hydrogen in the hydrogen production process. The reactor vessel consists of a long vessel including pipe and catalyst balls, and then the space between the pipe and the vessel is filled with small catalyst balls. It is difficult to examine the stress state of the pipe in the vessel when the vessel is bent by mechanical and thermal loads in the operation. Because the section packed the catalyst balls isn't a continuum and the catalyst balls can't be transmitted the forces to separate in tensile state. In this paper, a method was proposed to identify the effective material constants of the section packed the catalyst balls in the vessel. The validity of the proposed method was confirmed by numerical simulations and experiment.
