PFR Problem - Steam Methane Reforming

[Thomas Kaminski]

Hello,

I'm new to DWSIM and I'm trying to simulate methane steam reforming, however I'm having an issue with the PFR. I have modelled the reactions as hetergenous catalytic and taken the kinetics from the sample provided with DWSIM. However, I keep getting different types of errors depending on what I change in the PFR. If I have no catalyst loading I get the following error: PFR-000: TP Flash: One or more flash specifications values are invalid. Please check the associated Unit Operation ro Material Stream for incorrect specifications or miscalculated values. If I specify a catalyst loading I recieve the following error: PFR-000: An error occured during the mass balance calculation. Check the reaction kinetics data and reactor sizing information as well. I'm just not sure where the problem is, and the PFR in the steam reforming sample provided with DWSIM is bugged and crashes the program when inspected. Any idea whats going wrong? I've attached my simulation.

Thomas

[Daniel Medeiros]

Hi Thomas,

First thing you must check is the decimal separator in the kinetic expressions. Make sure they're the same as in your current regional settings.

Second, see if you have GPU acceleration enabled in Settings, General Settings > Solver Config. It should only be enabled if you have a CUDA/OpenCL capable GPU.

The sample is not bugged, I tested it a few days ago and it was working just fine. You can try this beta build and see if your simulation works with it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dwsim/files/DWSIM/DWSIM%203.5/

Regards
Daniel

[Thomas Kaminski]

With the beta version I was able to open the reforming sample and inspect the PFR unit, which itself is very helpful in debugging my simulation. It seems that the pressure was too high for the PFR parameters that I specified.