SMR: Steam Methane Reforming

Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) Reactor — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project presents a CFD simulation of Steam Methane Reforming (SMR), the most widely used industrial route for producing hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels. In an SMR plant, methane reacts with steam over a catalyst to produce hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide through a series of endothermic reactions, with the necessary heat supplied by a burner in a surrounding heating chamber. In this project, you'll model a sleeve-type SMR reactor — capturing both the catalytic reforming reactions inside the tubes and the combustion that supplies their heat — a genuine multi-physics chemical-engineering problem. Within the Reacting Flow: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project moves beyond pure combustion into industrial reacting flow, coupling catalytic chemistry with the combustion that drives it.

Methodology

The SMR plant geometry — a heating chamber plus reforming tubes — is designed in Design Modeler and meshed with a large unstructured grid of roughly 1.65 million elements for the complex multi-zone reactor. The Species Transport model is set up to track multiple chemical species (H₂, CO, CO₂, CH₄, O₂), with multiple volumetric reactions defined — three reforming reactions inside the tubes and one combustion reaction in the thermal chamber. A porous medium is modeled as the catalyst inside the reforming tubes, coupling the reacting flow with porous-zone behavior. The setup handles the endothermic reforming reactions and the heat coupling between the burner and the reforming tubes, so the combustion heat drives the hydrogen-producing chemistry inside the tubes.

Analysis

Post-processing focuses on the mass-fraction contours of each species, verifying methane consumption and hydrogen production and confirming that the reactor is operating correctly. From these fields you can follow how the reforming reactions convert methane and steam into hydrogen along the tubes, and how the combustion in the surrounding chamber supplies the heat that sustains them. Hydrogen is central to clean energy, ammonia synthesis, and refining, and the skills developed here — multi-reaction Species Transport coupled with catalytic porous zones — transfer directly to catalytic converters, fuel reformers, chemical reactors, and combustion systems across the process industries. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a multi-reaction Species Transport model, couple reacting flow with a catalytic porous zone, handle endothermic reactions with burner heat coupling, and interpret species contours to evaluate reactor performance.