Experimental and numerical analysis of the CO shift process for purified hydrogen production in an integrated gasification fuel cell

The Korean government has recently begun to focus on securing adequate hydrogen production to meet demands for the development and disseminaetion of sustainable technologies. This study describes a Korean national project developed for this hydrogen production purpose. In this study, we investigated the CO shift process for producing purified hydrogen in an integrated gasification fuel cell using experimental and numerical analyses. First, we successively designed and constructed a system with a syngas input of 160 Nm3/h; this system was efficiently operated for 45 h and we thus classified the operation into five spans (Start-Up, Heat-Up, Syngas Feeding, Steady-State, and Shut-Down). For example, in the span of State-State, the syngas load from 160 to 200 Nm3/h under the same H2O feeding conditions. Second, based on a computational flow dynamic model and its verification (comparison with experimental results), we conducted a parameter study on the effects that water injection has on the high-temperature CO shift reactor and showed that cases with a well-designed heat removal system yielded higher CO than other cases. The results of this study can be used as a guideline to develop CO shift processes at commercial grades (i.e., 10,000 Nm3/h syngas) for the production of purified hydrogen.