Abstract

The design project’s goal is to design a plant capable of producing hydrogen sustainably at an industrial scale. After preliminary design the plant designed was split into sections for which was split between the members tasked to conclude this design, for which each member is to produce a detailed design of their section.

The detailed design in this report concludes a safe and efficient design for the filtration unit to be used as part of the purification process used to convert the crude glycerol feed to pure glycerol to be used in the glycerol steam reforming process to form the required hydrogen. Due to the coupled and interlinked nature of the design parameters of the filtration unit the theory and design equations are outlined prior to an application of an optimisation algorithm to determine the optimum design parameters. Furthermore, as due to the fact that parameters are present that are to be determined experimentally, a summary of the experimental procedures and theory needed to determine these parameters are outlined, in addition to the equations and assumption used to determine the values theoretically.
In addition, a control and safety instrumented system was developed to conserve optimum and efficient operation as well as the capability to adapt to changes in conditions and production rate as well as safeguard safe operation.