Abstract
This study shows the improvement on the performance of water gas shift reaction membrane reactor with divergent flow channels by numerical simulation. With a short length of membrane reactor, the complete chemical reaction of synthetic gas is not achieved. Both the residence time and membrane area increase in divergent flow channels on the reaction side. The divergent flow channel can slow down the velocity to provide more time to react for synthetic gas and to diffuse for H2. These reasons result in a significant performance improvement on both the reaction and permeation sides. For large reaction side outlet radius, the molar fraction can be separated into three regions: permeation limit, transition and reaction limit. In the region of permeation limit, the influence of reaction is much larger than that of permeation due to the lack of products. The influences of reaction and permeation are nearly equal in the transition region. In the region of reaction limit, the reaction rate is relatively slow because of abundant products. The membrane reactor with divergent flow channels improves the performance not only on CO conversion but also on H2 recovery under the conditions used in the present study.