Catalytic performance of Ni catalyst for steam methane reforming in a micro-channel reactor at high pressure

Hydrogen has drawn much attention as both a kind of clean and efficient energy and an important chemical material. Among numerous production method, steaming methane reforming (SMR) accounts for most of the hydrogen production over the world. In this work, we investigated the behavior of Ni catalyst and performance of micro-channel reactor at high pressure for SMR process. The influences of various temperature, steam-to methane ratio, GHSV at high pressure varied from 0.5 MPa to 2.0 MPa were studied in details. Even when the process was conducted at 240,000 h(-1), the methane conversion could still approach to the thermodynamics limitation at 900 degrees C and 2.0 MPa, which confirmed that micro-channel reactor with coated catalyst is not only feasible but high efficient for SMR process. Besides, we realized the hydrogen productivity of about 0.1 m(3)/h in a single channel at 2.0 MPa, namely 1.95 x 10(4) m(3)/(m(3) h) space time productivity.