Abstract
This work is mainly focused at developing the hydrogen production unit with the capacity of 20 $Nm^3/h$ of high purity hydrogen. At present steam reforming of natural gas is the preferable method to produce hydrogen at the point of production cost. The developed hydrogen production unit composed of natural gas reformer and pressure swing adsorption system. To improve the thermal efficiency of steam reforming reactor, the internal heat recuperating structure was adopted. The heat contained in reformed gas which comes out of the catalytic beds recovered by reaction feed stream. These features of design reduce the fuel consumption into burner and the heat duty of external heat exchangers, such as feed pre-heater and steam generator. The production rate of natural gas reformer was 41.7 $Nm^3/h$ as a dryreformate basis. The composition of PSA feed gas was $H_2$ 78.26%, $CO_2$ 18.49%, CO 1.43% and $CH_4$ 1.85%. The integrated production unit can produce 21.1 $Nm^3/h$ of high-purity hydrogen (99.997%). The hydrogen production efficiency of the developed unit was more than 58% as an LHV basis.
