Pressure swing adsorption/membrane hybrid processes for hydrogen purification with a high recovery

Abstract

Hydrogen was recovered and purified from coal gasification-produced syngas using two kinds of hybrid processes: a pressure swing adsorption (PSA)-membrane system (a PSA unit followed by a membrane separation unit) and a membrane-PSA system (a membrane separation unit followed by a PSA unit). The PSA operational parameters were adjusted to control the product purity and the membrane operational parameters were adjusted to control the hydrogen recovery so that both a pure hydrogen product (>99.9%) and a high recovery (>90%) were obtained simultaneously. The hybrid hydrogen purification processes were simulated using HYSYS and the processes were evaluated in terms of hydrogen product purity and hydrogen recovery. For comparison, a PSA process and a membrane separation process were also used individually for hydrogen purification. Neither process alone produced high purity hydrogen with a high recovery. The PSA-membrane hybrid process produced hydrogen that was 99.98% pure with a recovery of 91.71%, whereas the membrane-PSA hybrid process produced hydrogen that was 99.99% pure with a recovery of 91.71%. The PSA-membrane hybrid process achieved higher total H₂ recoveries than the membrane-PSA hybrid process under the same H₂ recovery of membrane separation unit. Meanwhile, the membrane-PSA hybrid process achieved a higher total H₂ recovery (97.06%) than PSA-membrane hybrid process (94.35%) at the same H₂ concentration of PSA feed gas (62.57%).

Key words： hydrogen purification; PSA; membrane separation; hybrid process

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the financial support of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (21125628) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2012AA03A611). We also highly appreciate the technique support from Zhejiang Baling-Hengyi Caprolactam Co., LTD for that they adopted the hybrid PSA/membrane hydrogen purification technology we designed and testified the results of our work.

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