A comparative study of membrane reactor and cylindrical reactor using multi-objective optimization for methane reforming process

Abstract

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) of methane reforming process has been performed for hydrogen and oxygen perm-selective membrane reactor (MR) considering three objectives, namely H2 yield maximization, CO2 minimization and reactor length minimization. The performance of the MR has been compared with that of the cylindrical reactor (CR) using the same objective functions. Four MOO problems have been formulated and solved in this work. Among these, three problems consist of 2-objectives, while one has 3-objectives. Comparative results and discussions of the two reactors are presented based on the multi-objective pareto curve analysis and the trends of decision variables. The results in this work indicate that MR performs better than CR in all the four multi-objective scenarios. We further optimize the reactor with the above mentioned all the three objectives to produce syngas with different (H2/CO) ratios in the product stream. This is especially useful for producing the syngas targeting a specific end application.