A numerical study of heat and mass transfer at catalytic methane steam reforming in steady two-dimensional flow in microchannel

Abstract

Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Turkey, 19-21 July, 2010.

This research consists of the numerical investigation of the influence of sequence of the surface catalytic reactions on the development of heat and mass transfer at steam methane reforming in a two-dimensional microchannel reactor. The numerical simulation was performed within the framework of two-dimensional stationary Navier-Stokes equations for laminar, compressible, multicomponent gas with variable tbermophysical properties of the gas mixture, depending on the temperature and composition of the mixture. The catalytic reactions make transverse moles flux in the gas mixture and reduce the dimensionless coefficients of heat and mass transfer. The expressions for evaluating the magnitude of the local heat and mass transfer coefficients disturbance at catalytic reaction on the wall were obtained under the film theory assumption, !bey adjusted with the numerical data. The thermophysical properties dependence on the mixture composition and temperature also changes the values of the dimensionless heat and mass transfer coefficients. The effect of variation in the local Sherwood and Nusselt numbers with temperature is greater than the effect of variation with changes in the molar composition of the mixture or the effect of nonzero mole flux from the walls.