New pressure-swing adsorption cycles for gas separation and purification

IEC 98

James A. Ritter, Armin D. Ebner, James A. McIntyre, Steven P. Reynolds, and Karen D. Daniel. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208
We have been developing new pressure swing adsorption (PSA)cycles for gas separation and purification based on the dual and enriching reflux concepts. Conventional PSA cycles are based essentially on a stripping reflux concept and designed, for the most part, to produce a pure light component from a gas mixture. Recent results from my group have shown that a PSA cycle can also be designed to produce a pure heavy component from a gas mixture using enriching instead of stripping reflux. Moreover, theoretically we have shown that it is also possibile to produce two pure components from a binary gas mixture with 100% recovery of each component by combining the stripping and enriching reflux cycles into a single dual reflux cycle. The goal of this presentation is to discuss our most recent experimental and theoretical results on these novel PSA cycles.