Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Fuel journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fuel Full Length Article Hydrogen production as a green fuel in silica membrane reactor: Experimental analysis and artificial neural network modeling Kamran Ghasemzadeh a, ⁎ , Abbas Aghaeinejad-Meybodi b , Angelo Basile c a Chemical Engineering Faculty, Urmia University of Technology, Urmia, Iran b Chemical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran c ITM-CNR, c/o University of Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, Cubo 17/C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Hydrogen production Silica membrane reactor Modeling Artificial neural network Methanol steam reforming ABSTRACT In this work, artificial neural networks (ANNs) model has been developed for investigation of the silica mem- brane reactor (MR) performance during methanol steam reforming (MSR) reaction. Particularly, such para- meters as the transmembrane pressure (from 0.5 to 1.5 bar), reaction temperature (from 513 to 573 K), gas hourly space velocity (GHSV) between 3300 and 10000 h -1 and Steam/MeOH molar ratio (from 1 to 3) have been taken to account from both experimental and modeling viewpoints in order to analyze their influences on the silica MR performance with respect to traditional reactor (TR) in terms of methanol conversion, CO se- lectivity, total hydrogen yield, hydrogen recovery, hydrogen and carbon monoxide compositions. The ANN model results have been validated by using portion of the experimental data. Moreover, regarding to optimi- zation results of ANNs model, reaction temperature was selected as the most effective operating parameter in the silica membrane reactor and traditional reactor during MSR reaction. 1. Introduction Nowadays, one of the main worldwide environmental challenges is devoted to the search for clean energy sources. Reducing the content of gas emissions that contributes to the global warming and greenhouse effect is imperative, and fuel cells are one of the most promising attractive options to solve this problem. As only heat and water are released hydrogen fuel cells can be used as a producer of clean electrical power [1–4]. In general, to generate electrical power, polymer elec- trolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) need hydrogen as fuel. However, direct consumption of hydrogen in the PEMFC presents transport and storage problems make happen by its low density of energy. Therefore, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2018.02.146 Received 30 October 2017; Received in revised form 20 February 2018; Accepted 21 February 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: Kamran.Ghasemzadeh@uut.ac.ir (K. Ghasemzadeh). Fuel 222 (2018) 114–124 0016-2361/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T