Multi-objective optimization of a hydrogen production process for polymer membrane coupled with electrochemical hydrogen pump from hydrogen-doped natural gas by NSGA-II

In this work, a novel process of polymer membrane coupled with electrochemical hydrogen pump (EHP) was proposed to achieve efficient hydrogen production from hydrogen-doped natural gas (HDNG), and was simulated by UniSim Design. A hydrogen separation unit of two-stage polymer membrane was used for achieving hydrogen enrichment from low H2 concentration HDNG. Due to the hydrogen upgrade, EHP was operated at a H2 concentration much higher than HDNG, resulting in low energy consumption. Benefiting from the synergy between hydrogen upgrade and purification, the coupling process brought substantial effect while improving the hydrogen purity and recovery rate and reducing the hydrogen separation cost. The real natural gas components were considered into HDNG to ensure the effectiveness of process simulation. An optimization strategy considering both product yield and production cost was proposed to achieve the trade-off between hydrogen recovery rate and separation cost. However, the impact of process parameters on the objectives is nonlinear and difficult to describe with mathematical expressions. Therefore, an agent model of the proposed process was established based on back propagation neural network (BPNN), and multi-objective optimization of H2 recovery rate and total annual cost (TAC) of hydrogen separation unit was achieved using non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II). Investigations with HDNG under various operating conditions (feed pressure of 8–40 bar and feed H2 concentration of 5–25 mol%) were performed, which proved that 90 % overall H2 recovery rate and 99.99 mol% H2 purity of hydrogen product can be achieved at low cost, with the lowest hydrogen separation cost of 1.00 $/kg H2 achievable at 40 bar feed pressure and 25 mol% feed H2 concentration. In summary, this coupling process can provide engineering solutions for efficient hydrogen production from HDNG and promote the development of green hydrogen.