Summary Of The Oxygen Purify Technology

Crystalline Lithium X Molecular Sieve in oxygen concentrators have differential selectivity with respect to the gaseous components of air, making it possible to remove nitrogen, argon and other trace elements from the feed air to the PSA process. Current oxygen concentrator technologies utilize NaX, CaX or LiX zeolites to selectively remove nitrogen from feed air in the PSA process. With such adsorbents, oxygen product purity is limited to nominally 95% because argon is not removed and concentrates in the product gas.

The Air Products’ pressure swing adsorption process and Lithium Molecular Sievecombine to enable the selective, initial adsorption of nitrogen over oxygen and argon and subsequently, the selective adsorption of argon over oxygen.

Description Of The Lithium zeolite Technology

Air Products is offering for license a crystalline lithium-X zeolite material and associated Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) process that enable production of gaseous oxygen at greater than 99% oxygen purity. By selectively removing argon, the offering enables production of high purity oxygen, a relevant challenge facing designers and suppliers of medical oxygen concentrator technology.

Pressure Swing Adsorbtion (PSA) or Vaccum Pressure Swing Adsorbtion (VPSA) is the most commonly used non-cryogenic oxygen production process while the cryogenic air separation processes are routinely used in medium to large scale plants to produce nitrogen, oxygen, and argon as gases and/or liquid products. In both of the oxygen production method, zeolite molecular sieve is an important material for oxygen generation and production. In the PSA/VPSA oxygen generation process, zeolite molecular sieve works as a filter to separate oxygen and nitrogen to get high purity oxygen. And in the cryogenic air separation process, molecular sieve is loaded in the prepurification unit to remove the trace water in the air. The the dry air will be liquified and separated to get high purity oxygen, nitrogen, argon etc.