Download or read book Syngas and Hydrogen Production Enhancement Strategies in Chemical Looping Systems written by Sourabh Gangadhar Nadgouda and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of syngas and hydrogen (H2) along with the abundance of natural gas underlines the need for an energy efficiency and economical means of syngas and H2 production from natural gas. The conventional processes for syngas and H2 production consist of several unit operations and are very energy intensive. Additionally, these processes have a lot of CO2 emissions which is a major drawback considering the concern for global warming cause by greenhouse effect. Chemical looping process is an attractive alternative to the conventional processes. It has better exergy efficiency and reduces the downstream processing steps by inherent separation of the products. The reducing and oxidizing gases are either spatially or temporally separation which minimizes the safety hazard of forming a flammable mixture at high temperature. Despite several research efforts in application of chemical looping for syngas and H2 production there still exists scope for improvement in terms of syngas yield and overall process efficiency. In this thesis, the three major aspects of chemical looping process: oxygen carriers, reactor configuration and process configuration, are explored for strategies to enhance syngas and H2 yield. A co-current moving bed reactor configuration is simulated experimentally and theoretically for copper-iron oxygen carriers in addition to testing 5 different process configurations for the overall system. CH4 conversion and dry syngas purity of 99.5% and 97.5%, respectively, is observed in a U-tube fixed bed reactor where a co-current moving bed reactor solids profile is mimicked using copper oxide (20 wt%) - iron oxide (60 wt%) - aluminium oxide (20 wt%) oxygen carrier. The net H2 production is higher by 28% and effective thermal efficiency is 10% more than that of autothermal reforming process for the best performing process configuration. A different process configuration is also shown to have higher syngas yield than the conventional two reactor chemical looping reforming system with iron oxide-magnesium aluminate as the oxygen carrier. Process simulations in ASPEN Plus software are performed under different heat transfer, pressure and co-injection conditions to understand the benefit offered by the improved process configuration. Finally, an improvement in H2 production and, subsequently, cold gas efficiency for a chemical looping combustion system is observed using a staged H2 separation approach in the oxidizer reactor. H2 separation module was simulated in ASPEN Plus software and several combinations of separation modules and oxidizer reactor were screened for highest H2 production. A maximum cold gas efficiency of about 79%, which is 7% and 1.5% higher than the steam methane reforming process (Department of Energy baseline case) and traditional chemical looping combustion system, respectively.