UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Steam Reformer Design

CHEN 90013 Process Engineering

Michelle Quak Lam Shu Jie Andrew Lee Jonathan Loke Mao Ling Hii

342786 338192 327384 326110 329697

16/4/2012
Lecturer: Dr John Provis

Executive Summary
This report involves the design of a standard tubular steam-methane reformer for a 1000 tonne/day methanol production plant in the North-West Shelf Region of Western Australia. The main focus in designing the reformer was to obtain optimal reformer performance whilst restricting the design parameters within values supported by literature. Several reformer configurations were compared and a top-fired reformer was chosen in this design primarily due to its plant scale applicability, cost effectiveness, and higher methane conversion. This report also involved the use of HYSYS as an assistive tool in determining the process conditions and reformer design parameters. To determine the stability of the design, an extensive sensitivity analysis was performed on five different variables including process conditions such as feed flowrate, composition, temperature, pressure and bed voidage. The effect of various design parameters such as number of tubes, tube length and tube diameter on system performance and costs were also considered. This report has found that the best reformer design comprised 400 tubes, each 14 m in length and 15 cm in diameter, resulting in a methane conversion of 80.81% and a pressure drop of 6.134 kPa. Design values used in this report agreed well with literature values and the composition of the output stream of the reformer remained within 10% of ideal values provided previously. The designed reformer is sufficiently robust such that reasonable variations in the design parameters can be accommodated while maintaining methane conversions at 10% of the ideal value. Hence it can be concluded that the reformer design in this report has been optimized accordingly to achieve the best methane conversion.