Hydrogen production through the fuel processing of liquefied natural gas with silicon-based micro-reactors

Abstract

Silicon-based micro-reactors for the fuel processing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) were fabricated using silicon technologies. The micro-LNG steam reformer achieves a LNG conversion of 77.4%, and the hydrogen composition of the product was 73.3% at 600 degrees C. The product gas was supplied to consecutive micro-reactors to carry out carbon monoxide removal through a high-temperature water gas shift (HTS) reaction and a low-temperature water gas shift (LTS) reaction. Under operating conditions we investigated, the micro-HTS and LTS reactors demonstrated the highest carbon monoxide conversion of 61.5% at 450 degrees C and 77.5% at 300 degrees C, respectively. The final product gas of the micro-fuel processor was composed of 75.7% hydrogen and 0.7% carbon monoxide. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.