Separation of hydrogen from methane by vacuum swing adsorption

Abstract

One option for economical storage and transportation of hydrogen in near future is to add it to the existing natural gas pipelines. Hydrogen co-transported in this way can be extracted from the natural gas to produce either pure hydrogen or natural gas for different applications. The goal of this study is to assess experimentally the production of high purity hydrogen and/or natural gas products from hydrogen/natural gas mixtures using a vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) process at low pressure terminals. A four-bed VSA apparatus filled with Norit RB4 activated carbon was used in the lab for the experiments. High purity hydrogen (>99%) was achieved with the VSA process for hydrogen feed concentr..