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Smulation of Hydrogen Production by the Process of Thermal Decomposition of Methane

Parishan, Samira | 2012

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 43852 (46)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Energy Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Saboohi, Yadollah
  7. Abstract:
  8. Different disadvantages associated with using fossil fuels as the main energy source including crisis of wells’ depletion and serious environmental problems, causing by the emission of large quantities of greenhouse gases (GHG), especially carbon dioxide (CO2), has increased attention to replacing them with renewable and clean fuels such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy sources. Hydrogen, as a clean energy carrier, is one of the best fuels in terms of the environment and cost. So, it is recently receiving increasing attention and it may one day replace fossil fuels for various applications such as in automobiles and power stations. The main subject of this thesis was surveying the process of thermal decomposition of methane (TDM) which these days, is known as the most promising method of producing hydrogen. First of all, in this thesis different ways of producing hydrogen have been compared. Second, all parameters which play a major role in proceeding the Thermal Decomposition of Methane process were introduced. All required data like viscosity, density, heat capacity and thermal conductivity have been collected by simulating the process with Hysis software.
    Finally, the process was simulated by the help of MFIX software, the process reactor was a fluidized bed one with the size of 14 ×100 〖cm〗^2 that 30 cm of its height is field with carbon catalyst particles. The most persuasive reason for choosing MFIX as the simulation software was that it is an open source code which is especially developed for simulating multi-phase flow with interphase exchange. The simulation has been done in 2 dimensional space and the reactor was divided to 700 regular meshes with the size of 1×1 〖cm〗^2. In addition, time steps have been set in 4s. It is worth mentioning, by the aim of decreasing the programs’ run time, one of the thirteen core computing servers of Sharif University of Technology was used and it could change run times from approximately two hours to fifteen minutes. The main purpose of the present research was surveying the role of pressure, flow rate and temperature of catalyst particles on the efficiency of process. Also, all the data were analyzed with a MATLAB code for finding minimum fluidization velocity. At the end, it was observed that the process at the pressure of one bar and the temperature of 1200 k with the velocity between 4-8 times more that its minimum fluidization velocity shows the best economical and operational efficiency
  9. Keywords:
  10. Greenhouse Gases ; Thermal Decomposition ; Methane Molecule ; Hydrogen Producing ; Clean Fuel

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