Heat Integrated Wall Reactor - HIWAR

Reactor design greatly affects fuel processor efficiency and research has shown that classical designs can be improved significantly. The most common design called for a large number of catalyst filled tubes to be placed inside an open flame furnace that provided the heat required to drive the reaction to completion.This is a rather inefficient arrangement since heat must be transported from the flame to the catalyst particles where it is needed, overcoming many resistances.

HELBIO's solution was a heat exchanger type reactor. The first generation of such reactors is the Heat Integrated Wall Reactor (HIWAR) covered under International Patent PTC 98010080/22.05.98 (Fig. 6). The reactor consists of a bundle of tubes inside which reforming takes place on a catalyst deposited in a thin film on the inner surface of each tube. A combustion catalyst is deposited on the outer surface of the tube. In this manner, combustion is controlled very close to where the demand for heat is located while heat transfer is very efficient across the metallic tube wall. This translates to very efficient and compact reactor designs.