Thermodynamic study of reformer of the Tehran refinery hydrogen plant using minimization of Gibbs free energy

The equilibrium chemical reactions taken place in a reformer reactor of the Tehran refinery hydrogen plant was studied using the minimization of Gibbs free energy method. In the minimization of the Gibbs free energy function the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell (DFP) optimization procedure using the penalty terms in the well-defined objective function was used. It should be noted that in the DFP procedure along with the corresponding penalty terms the Hessian matrices for the composition of constituents in the reformer reactor can be excluded. This, in fact, can be considered as the main advantage of the DFP optimization procedure. Also the effect of temperature, pressure and steam ratio on the equilibrium composition of the constituents was investigated. The results obtained in this work were compared with the data collected from the reformer reactor of the Tehran refinery hydrogen plant. It was concluded that the results obtained from the method used in this work are in good greement with the industrial data. Notably, the algorithm developed in this work, in spite of its simplicity, takes the advantage of short computation and convergence time.

Keywords:

Reformer reactors , Chemical equilibrium , Gibbs free energy