3-D model of a radial flow sub-watt methanol fuel processor

•Micro-scale methanol fuel processor with a radial flow design is modeled.•Two types of performance improvements over the baseline reactor are proposed and modeled.•By including fins in the reactor design, the numerical simulation predicts a 2.7× increase in performance.

A 3-D model is presented for a novel sub-watt packed bed reactor. The reactor uses an annular inlet flow combined with a radial flow packed bed reactor. The baseline reactor is compared to a reactor with multiple outlets and a reactor with 3 internal fins. Increasing the outlets from 1 to 4 may have improved flow distribution, but did not increase the performance. However, inserting fins allowed >99% methanol conversion with approximately 30 K decrease in temperature with same inlet flow.