Innovation of Small and Micro-scale Natural Gas to Hydrogen Technology and Reactor
Hydrogen production from the natural gas with the miniature devices is an important technology to obtain small-scale,low-cost,and high-purity hydrogen sources conveniently.With the rapid development of hydrogen energy and fuel cells,hydrogen production from small and micro devices is expected to be widely used in such fields as small-scale transportation,experiments,power generation,and heating with the help of perfect natural gas transmission and distribution network.This paper sorts out and analyzes the progress of technology and reactors suitable for hydrogen production from small and micro devices,and introduces two technologies of the low temperature and low pressure steam reforming and small-sized autothermic reforming beads on the widely used natural gas reforming technology and such three subversive reactor technologies as the small-sized traditional steam reforming reactor,the plate-type reactor and the membrane reactor.It believes that hydrogen production with small and micro devices is conducive to promoting the application of the distributed hydrogen production and the distributed power generation with the fuel cell and the disruptive innovation on reactors in the future will be the main development trend though the present innovation is mainly focusing on making the traditional technology the small-sized one.
Natural gas to hydrogenMembrane reactorPlate reactorNatural gas reforming