New Indexes for the Comparison of Membrane and Traditional Reactors

Particularly for MRs, some specific indexes were introduced, taking into account, among the several advantages connected to their use, the use related to the conversion improvement, which means better exploitation of raw mate-rialand plant size reduction. This allows a better performance to be achieved than with a TR, with reduced reaction volumes and separation loads. These new metrics are  

Volume index (VI), defined as the ratio of the catalytic volume of an MR and that of a TR for reaching a set conversion of the reference reactant Conversion index (Cl), the ratio between the conversion of an MR and a TR, at a set reaction volume 

Extraction index (El), the ratio between H2 permeated through the membrane with respect to that totally fed to the reactor. 

1 Case Study Water Gas Shift Reaction in a Membrane Reactor 

As widely described above (see Section 12.3.2), WGS is a fundamental stage in H2 production plants. Therefore, it was chosen as a case study because it can 

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