H2 production via ammonia decomposition in a catalytic membrane reactor
2021
Cechetto, Valentina | Di Felice, Luca | Medrano, Jose A. | Makhloufi, Camel | Zuniga, Jon | Gallucci, Fausto
The membrane reactor is proposed in this work as a system with high potential to efficiently recover the hydrogen (H₂) stored in ammonia (NH₃), which has been recently proposed as an alternative for H₂ storage. With this technology, NH₃ decomposition and high-purity H₂ separation are simultaneously performed within the same unit, and high H₂ separation efficiency is achieved at lower temperature compared to conventional systems, leading to energetic and economic benefits. NH₃ decomposition was experimentally performed in a Pd-based membrane reactor over a Ru-based catalyst and the performance of the conventional packed bed reactor were used as benchmark for a comparison. The results demonstrate that the introduction of a membrane in a conventional reactor enhances its performance and allows to achieve conversion higher than the thermodynamic equilibrium conversion for sufficiently high temperatures. For temperatures from and above 425 °C, full NH₃ conversion was achieved and more than 86% of H₂ fed to the system as ammonia was recovered with a purity of 99.998%. The application of vacuum at the membrane permeate side leads to higher H₂ recovery and NH₃ conversions beyond thermodynamic restrictions. On the other hand, the reactor feed flow rate and operating pressure have not shown major impacts on NH₃ conversion.
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