Experimental Study of an Intensified Water–Gas Shift Reaction Process Using a Membrane Reactor/Adsorptive Reactor Sequence

We present here a preliminary experimental study of a novel reactor configuration, consisting of a membrane reactor (MR) followed by two adsorptive reactors (ARs) in parallel, operating alternately, utilized for the production of high-purity hydrogen with simultaneous CO2 capture during the water gas shift (WGS) reaction treating a coal gasifier off-gas. In the study, we used a commercial sour-shift WGS catalyst (Co/Mo/Al2O3) in both the MR and the AR A carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membrane was used in the MR, and a hydrotalcite adsorbent was used in the A.R. The experimental results show that membrane, catalyst, and adsorbent all operated stably under the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC)-relevant conditions. The MR-AR reactor sequence displayed performance superior to that of a conventional packed-bed reactor (PBR) with near 100% conversions attained while the ARs are functional (with an ultrapure hydrogen stream exiting the AR and permeate-side hydrogen purities from the MR of similar to 75-80%). Thus, these findings manifest the ability of the hybrid MR-AR process configuration to operate properly under the desired conditions and to intensify the efficiency of the WGS reaction, as well as to validate its potential to function as a high-efficiency, ultra-compact process for incorporation into IGCC power plants for environmentally benign power generation with pre-combustion CO2 capture.