Process Development for Hydrogen Production via Water-Gas Shift Reaction Using Aspen HYSYS

The development of a process for the production of hydrogen through water-gas shift reaction has been developed and simulated in this work using Aspen HYSYS. This was achieved by picking the pieces of process equipment of the plant from the appropriate section of the Aspen HYSYS environment and connecting them together through appropriate streams. In addition, the components involved in the process were selected from the Aspen HYSYS databank. Peng-Robinson Stryjek-Vera (PRSV) was used as the fluid package of the developed process for property estimation during the simulation. The reaction of the process was modelled as an equilibrium type, the equilibrium constant of which was estimated using Gibbs Free Energy. From the results obtained, it has been established that pure hydrogen can be obtained from a plant comprising of a mixer, a reactor (with approximately 80.07% conversion of the reactants), a separator and two heat exchangers based on the fact that the mole fraction, the mass fraction and the volume fraction of hydrogen obtained from the simulation carried out when carbon monoxide and steam were passed into the process plant at room temperature (25 °C) and boiling temperature of water (100 °C), respectively under atmospheric pressure was approximately 1.