Scale-up of steam reforming technology

For heated and convective reformers a scale-up requires at least one full-size tube due to the interaction between complicated heat transfer, catalyst and in particular mechanical design. For an adiabatic reactor scale-up can in principle be carried out using the reactor diameter, but the basic experiments must be truly adiabatic and at industrial mass velocities, so also in this case a pilot plant can be used (refer to Section 3.5.1). For other equipment items, such as burners, scale-up will usually require a combination of flow experiments, CFD modelling and full-scale tests. 

The furnace — with the exhaust chirrmey on the top — has radiant wall burners in six levels on two opposite walls to supply the heat of reaction to a single full-size tube located in the centre. Such a configuration is appropriate since it allows simulation of almost any outer tube-wall temperature profile by variation of the burner firing pattern. 

Although carefully designed experiments have been earned out in laboratory, beneh-seale and pilot plants, the final verifieation also requires feedbaek from an industrial plant, although inevitably ihe munber of measurements here is significantly smaller. It is, however, important that the same tools and principles for measurements and simulation are used in the seale-up process to provide the necessary knowledge for verifieation. 

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