Farhad Rahmani - Chemical Engineering Faculty, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
Mohammad Haghighi
Sara Ebrahimi
Mohammad Reza Rahimpour - Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Shiraz University

This work presents application of H-SOD membrane in a conventional single-type methanol reactor. A novel reactor configuration with water-permselective H-SOD membrane is proposed. Inthis configuration the reacting synthesis gas is fed to the shell side of reactor. Selective removal ofwater through the H-SOD membrane is achieved by co-current flow of sweep gas through the tube side. The reacting gas is cooled simultaneously with sweep gas in tube and saturated water in outershell. A steady-state heterogeneous model of the fixed bed predicts the performance of this novel configuration. The simulation results are compared with corresponding predictions for an industrial methanol fixed-bed reactor operated at identical process conditions. The simulationresults show that the proposed reactor operated with higher conversion, higher catalyst life and lower environmental impact due to lower CO2 emission than the other one. Therefore, using this novel configuration in methanol synthesis process could be feasible and beneficial

H-SOD membrane, Methanol synthesis, Steady-state model, Single-type reactor