Evaluation of a CFD model for a structured reactor for steam methane reforming with pilot plant data

Synthesis gas is an important intermediate used in industry for the production of fine chemical such as methanol, alkenes and aldehydes. The large amount of hydrogen contained in it is also employed in the ammonia synthesis process or for different hydrotreatment and hydrogeneation processes. Shale gas extraction renewed the interest in methane conversion to synthesis gas. Structured reactors are today in course of developing, in order to wave the limitations of the actual commercial reactors employed for methane steam reforming and even ensure higher throughputs. This thesis work aims to investigate the performances of an actual structured reactor in course of development: the ZoneFlow reactor. 3D-CFD and coupled 3D-CFD-reaction simulations employing a developed model and a simplified 3D reactor geometry, in a small computation domain were carried out in order to study the reactor fluid dynamic and conversion behaviour. The 3D-CFD-reaction model was tuned employing both cold pilot and pilot tests under commercial conditions in order to predict with sufficient precision the reactor behaviors and, finally, to simulate the ZoneFlow on commercial scales in order to evaluate his performance and to make comparisons with the actual reformer technology. At the end, simulations of cold-pilot tests employing the Large Eddy Simulation model for turbulence, in order to evaluate the LES capacity to predict faithfully turbulent flow behavior in the ZoneFlow reactor are done