CFD and FEM Thermo-Mechanical Design of a Recuperative-Dissipative Heat Exchanger for a Laboratory Water Gas Shift Reactor

A small scale test rig based on a two-stage reactor for testing water gas shift conversion processes has been set up at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cagliari, chiefly for the purpose of supporting a pilot plant operation for high sulphur (Sulcis) coal gasification, gas cleaning and treatment, CO2 separation, hydrogen and electricity production. The laboratory test rig comprises two packed-bed reactors in series to be operated at different temperatures and has been designed for testing CO-shift conversion processes using a variety of catalysts for different syngas temperatures (up to 500 °C) and compositions. One critical component of the system is a recuperative-dissipative heat exchanger placed between the two reactors. The heat exchanger, which preheats the syngas prior to entering the high temperature reactor and cools the shifted gas exiting there from, prior to its entering the low temperature reactor, is subjected to severe thermo-mechanical stress. Thus the design and analysis of this component, described herein, is a critical issue. A full 3D conjugate heat transfer CFD analysis of the tubular heat exchanger has been performed, considering different geometries. Based on the CFD results we were able to verify the preliminary design of the component, carried out using simple thermal correlations and to predict wall temperature distribution for the thermo-structural analysis.