Oxygen Specific Power Reduction for Air Separation

Technologies get dated in their life cycles and eventually their cost effectiveness is not as when they were new. One of these significant developments in air separation units is the reduction of regeneration temperature requirement and pressure drop across Molecular Sieve, which were expected to reduce the total power consumption. The impact of these expected developments were evaluated on oxygen specific power. The two developments methods were tested in this paper. The first method was the adoption of new molecular sieve that will consume less power than the current molecular sieve by 50%. The second development method was the modification of vessel layout, where two bed of molecular sieve can be used, which will reduce the pressure drop across molecular sieve system. The effect of these two methods was evaluated on oxygen specific power. The results showed that a negligible impact on oxygen specific power in case of the modification of vessel layout, where a significant impact in oxygen specific power was noticed by adoption of a new molecular sieve that consumes lower power than the current. This encourages the investment on molecular sieve development not on modifying the layout of vessel for the purpose of pressure drop reduction.