Chemical Reactions: Steam Methane Reforming (SMR)

What You'll Build

This lesson walks you through a CFD simulation of Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) — the most widely used industrial process 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 set of endothermic reactions, with the required 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 genuinely multi-physics chemical engineering problem.

What You'll Learn

• The chemistry behind Steam Methane Reforming and why it's central to hydrogen production

• How to design an SMR plant geometry — heating chamber plus reforming tubes — in Design Modeler

• How to generate a large unstructured mesh (~1.65 million elements) for a complex multi-zone reactor

• How to set up the Species Transport model to track multiple chemical species (H₂, CO, CO₂, CH₄, O₂)

• How to define multiple volumetric reactions — three reforming reactions inside the tubes and one combustion reaction in the thermal chamber

• How to model a porous medium as a catalyst inside the reforming tubes, coupling reacting flow with porous-zone behavior

• How to handle endothermic reactions and the heat coupling between the burner and the reforming tubes

• How to post-process mass fraction contours of each species to verify methane consumption and hydrogen production

• How to interpret results to confirm the reactor is operating correctly

Why It Matters

Hydrogen is central to clean energy, ammonia synthesis, and refining. The skills 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.