Thermal and chemical reaction performance analyses of steam methane reforming in porous media solar thermochemical reactor

•Steam methane reforming in porous reactor is driven by concentrated solar energy.•Using LNTE model with P1 approximation to solve heat transfer of porous reactor.•Irradiative heat transfer and chemical reaction kinetics is programmed via UDFs.•Effects of operation parameters on temperature and H2 production are investigated.

In order to investigate the thermochemical reaction performance of steam methane reforming (SMR), the steady heat and mass transfer model coupled with thermochemical reaction kinetics is developed for the volumetric porous media solar thermochemical reactor. The local non-thermal equilibrium (LNTE) model with modified P1 approximation is adopted to investigate the temperature distributions of the solid phase and fluid phase. For the solid phase energy equation, the irradiative heat transfer coupled with chemical reaction kinetics is programmed via User Defined Functions (UDFs). The concentrated solar irradiation is not only considered as the boundary condition at the reactor front surface, but also as the irradiative heat source in the whole volume of reactor. The parametric studies are conducted to investigate the thermal and hydrogen production performances as a function of operational parameters. The numerical results indicate that SMR reaction has big effects on temperature distribution. The generated H2 mole fraction decreases sharply with the increasing of fluid inlet velocity, porosity and mean cell size. The generated H2 mole fraction increases significantly with the increasing of incident solar irradiance.