Experimental study of hydrogen catalytic combustion wall temperature distribution characteristics and its effect on the coupling performance of autothermal reformers

Catalytic combustion can provide heat for reforming reactions using fuel cell tail gas, which improves the energy utilization efficiency of the system and shortens the reformer start-up time. In order to achieve efficient coupling and integration of reforming and combustion, it is important to study the wall temperature regulation and heat matching of the heat absorption and discharge reactions. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimization method for the synergistic regulation of parameters and structure, both in terms of key parameters (flow rate, temperature) and reactor structure (catalyst arrangement, flow path arrangement) for temperature field regulation, respectively. By means of experiments and numerical simulations, the following conclusions are obtained. The results show that H2 can be ignited at 25 °C, the optimum inlet temperature is 50 °C, and the hydrogen conversion rate is 90.7%. Furthermore, when the H2/air = 0.2, the reaction rate of hydrogen can reach 98%. The catalyst was arranged on the outlet side of the reactor with a uniform wall temperature and a hydrogen conversion rate of 98.21%. In the coupled mode, the hydrogen content of the product exceeds 70% when catalytic combustion is vertically aligned with catalytic reforming.