Experimental study of the design and performance optimisation of a self-heating methanol on-board reforming reactor for hydrogen production

There is an increasing research on efficient and compact on-board reformer, based on which a serpentine plate type self-heating reformer integrating preheating, reforming and combustion has been designed and fabricated, which can be disassembled and assembled flexibly. In this paper, experiments on the self-heating reformer have been carried out to optimise the differential structure of different chambers. It can be found that: the combustion chamber needs to be partitioned and the resistance loss is small and stable for a long time when the number of partitions is 3. The combustion chamber with O2/CH3OH = 1.5 has the highest wall temperature of 240 degrees C. Hydrogen yield can be increased to more than two times after optimising the evaporation chamber. The catalyst in the reforming chamber must be uniformly distributed, and the methanol conversion rate is stable at 75 % with a mass of 110 g and Weight Hourly Space Velocity (WHSV) = 8 h- 1. The optimum operating conditions of the reactor is WHSV = 8 h-1 with air flow rate of 25 L/min, at which the reactor starts up within 20 min, the hydrogen yield stabilises within 40 min, and the hydrogen yield is 9.8 L/min and remains stable for 120 min.