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

Oxygen Specific Power Consumption Comparison for Air Separation Units

Technologies life cycles became shorter than before as a result of globalization and open market, which derived organizations to update their dated technologies. Without technologies updating, which based on Technological Forecasting (TF), organizations can not be dominant leaders in the open market and eventually they will lose their business. The main objective of this paper was to evaluate the air separation units by calculating the oxygen specific power, to find the most cost effective unit. The oxygen specific power used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the selected Air Separation Unit (ASU) technologies. The KPI for the updated Air Separation Unit was reviewed and the latest value selected as theoretical benchmark, which was 0.28 Kw/Nm3. At the practical part, the data collected to three air separation units ASU-31, ASU-51 and ASU-71. The results showed that the specific power gaps that used as the KPI's of ASU-31, ASU-51 and ASU-71 are 0.464 Kw/Nm3, 0.639 Kw/Nm3 and 0.631 Kw/Nm3 respectively. The results showed that these gaps can be minimized by the recommendation suggested in this paper to reduce power consumption