A systematic parametric study on the effect of a catalyst coating microstructure on its performance in methane steam reforming

A systematic approach is presented to study the effect of a catalyst coating microstructure on its performance in a wall-coated steam methane reformer using response surface methodology. Three-dimensional simulation of diffusion and reaction are performed in several catalyst microstructures represented by packing of overlapping spheres. A surrogate model is developed based on Latin hypercube design of experiment and response surface methodology that relates the rate of hydrogen production in the catalyst coating microstructure to inter-particle porosity and average particle size. Two sets of simulations are done based on a kinetic model with two different sets of kinetic parameters and the results are compared. The comparison shows that the maximum rate of hydrogen production occurs at higher inter-particle porosity and smaller particle size, when the kinetics is faster and diffusion limitation is more severe.