Separation of He/N2/CH4 ternary mixtures by a triple-reflux pressure swing adsorption process

Abstract

Conventional pressure swing adsorption (PSA) processes can only produce one high purity product in a single stage, whereas the state-of-art dual-reflux PSA (DR-PSA) can produce two high purity products simultaneously. However, multicomponent gas separation is often required in the industry, targeting at recovering several valued products at the same time. In this study, we propose a novel adsorption process, namely triple-reflux PSA (TR-PSA), to separate three components simultaneously. A middle product outlet and a middle reflux stream were introduced to the adsorption columns of a conventional DR-PSA process to separate ternary mixtures of nitrogen, methane, and helium. Nonisothermal dynam..