Abstract
High temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) is expected to be used for various industrial applications such as hydrogen production with 950°C of high temperature heat. Towards commercialization of HTGR hydrogen production technologies, it is important to develop a system analysis code which can simulate dynamic behavior of a HTGR hydrogen production system to design a plant control system for the effects of circulated helium heat through both facilities.
As a first step of the development, we developed a heat and mass balance evaluation model of a helium-heated steam reformer. The model can simulate distributions of gas composition, pressure and temperature including transient behavior. The accuracy of the model was evaluated by comparing calculation results with experimental data on temperature distributions and the hydrogen production rate in a helium-heated steam reformer in an out-of-pile test facility, which is capable to produce about 100 Nm3 h−1 of hydrogen.
The several test conditions including (1) rated operation and (2) start-up operation in the out-of-pile test facility were selected and simulated by the developed model to validate the thermal-hydraulic model and the reaction characteristics in the steam reformer. Analyzing the simulation results, the performances of the developed model such as accuracy in heat and mass balance evaluation in the steam reformer were quantified.
The results showed that the calculated outlet gas composition from the reformer agreed well with the experimental result with high accuracy. The temperature distributions of helium, process and generated gases in the reformer could be evaluated with an accuracy of about 30°C or less, except for the outlet temperature of the generated gas.
