Alejandro Cifuentes López

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya | UPC · INTE - Institute of Energy Technologies

A simple proportional integral (PI) controller with scheduled gain has been developed and implemented in a catalytic membrane reactor (CMR) to obtain pure hydrogen from a methanol steam reforming process. The controller is designed to track the setpoint of the pure hydrogen flow rate in the permeate side of the CMR via the manipulation of the fuel...

A catalytic membrane reactor equipped with Pd–Ag metallic membranes and loaded with PdZn/ZnAl2O4/Al2O3 catalytic pellets was tested for the methanol steam reforming reaction (S/C = 1) aimed at producing a pure hydrogen stream for PEM fuel cell feeding. The catalyst was prepared in two steps. First, commercial γ-Al2O3 pellets were impregnated with Z...

Unlike other engineered ceramic products, alumina (Al2O3) displays interesting mechanical and physical properties, which makes it an ideal candidate for a wide range of uses in different fields and in particular for catalytic applications. However, the manufacturing of ceramic components has still a major drawback in production of highly complex th...

CO removal from a syngas was evaluated in a single catalytic unit using structured AuCu/CeO2–SiO2 catalysts. Initially, AuCu/CeO2–SiO2 powder catalysts with several SiO2 loadings (0–100 mol%) were assessed. SiO2 addition into AuCu/CeO2 increased the surface area by up to 3.4 times and reduced its cost by up to 60%, but reduced CO conversion. On the...

Existing literature data have been used to model the steam reforming of ethanol on catalytic honeycombs coated with Rh-Pd/CeO2, which have shown an excellent performance and robustness for the production of hydrogen under realistic conditions. In this article, a fully 3D non-isothermal model is presented, where the reactions of ethanol decompositio...