Experiments on hydrogen production from methanol steam reforming in fluidized bed reactor

•Approach for methanol steam reforming hydrogen production by fluidized bed reactor.•Effects of various parameters were investigated for operating condition selection.•High hydrogen producing rate can be achieved by fluidized bed reactor.

A novel approach for the hydrogen production which integrated methanol steam reforming and fluidized bed reactor (FBR) was proposed. The reaction was carried out over Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalysts. The critical fluidized velocities under different catalyst particle sizes and masses were obtained. The influences of the operating parameters, including that of H2O-to-CH3OH molar ratio, feed flow rate, reaction temperature, and catalyst mass on the performance of methanol steam reforming were investigated in FBR to obtain the optimum experimental conditions. More uniform temperature distribution, larger surface volume ratio and longer contacting time can be achieved in FBR than that in fixed bed reactor. The results indicate that the methanol conversion rate in FBR can be as high as 91.95% while the reaction temperatures is 330 °C, steam-to-carbon molar ratio is 1.3, and feed flow rate is 540 ml/h under the present experiments, which is much higher than that in the fixed bed.