SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS OF A HYDROGEN GENERATION UNIT

High Purity Grade Hydrogen is an important compound used in oil refineries due to its capacity for withdrawing sulfur impurities from fuels. This feedstock is commonly produced in Hydrogen Generation Units through a Steam Methane Reforming process. Due to the high-grade requirements in Hydrotreament processes, a hydrogen purification step is mandatory, often conducted in batteries of adsorption columns, known as Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA). The main objective of this paper is to present the simulation of a Hydrogen Generation Unit, focusing on the PSA process modeling approach. ASPEN PLUS™ was utilized in conjunction with MATLAB® to model the whole process. The link between both simulators was established through VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros developed in Excel. This two-way connection did not affect the results obtained by the simulation of the whole process unit, as it was carried out successfully and was able to represent the global mass and energy balances satisfactory, obtaining hydrogen with 99.8% purity.