Oxygen Separation from Air Using Pressure Swing Adsorption

Pressure swing adsorption is an important unit for gas separation and purification. In order to develop the PSA technology, a pilot plant including four beds each with 1 meter length and 3.5 cm ID was designed and built. This pilot includes control systems and analysis systems to investigate the various operational conditions of beds carefully. In order to test this pilot, separation of oxygen from air, using zeolite 5A type adsorbants, was studied. In this process the steps of feed pressurization, production, blowdown, purge, pressure equalization(two steps) and product pressurization are included in a cycle. The effects of pressure, cycle time, flow rate of feed and purge on gas purity and recovery were studied. Also modeling and simulation of this process was done by orthogonal collocation method and MATLAB software. The numerical results obtained from modeling were compared to the experimental results and gave reasonable agreements.