Pressure Swing Adsorption Technology

The NITROSWING and OXYSWING PSA gas generators apply an optimized Pressure Swing Adsorption process for the separation of either the nitrogen or the oxygen in ambient air from the other gases.

A NITROSWING or an OXYSWING generator contains either two single adsorption vessels (Twin-Tower systems) or a series of modules of two adsorption vessels (Modular systems), where each vessel is filled with an appropriate molecular sieve.

The gas production process starts by pressurizing one of the adsorption vessels with clean feed air. Before the equilibrium load is reached at the top of the adsorption bed, the feed air supply will be interrupted to prevent a break-through.

The adsorption vessels are alternatively loaded in order to guarantee a continuous product flow. If one adsorption vessel is loaded, simultaneously the other one is regenerated by a pressure decrease (desorption). The depressurisation required for regeneration is obtained by simply venting to the atmosphere.

Prior to the subsequent adsorption and desorption phase, a pressure equalization will take place between the adsorption vessels in order to preload the regenerated vessel by a gas rich in product.

Our PSA generators are able to produce nitrogen with a residual oxygen content from 10 ppm to 3,0 vol.%. Our PSA oxygen generators produce purities between 90 - 95% of oxygen.

Superior Technology from IGS

IGS' engineers have dedicated special attention to the adsorber vessel design in order to avoid fluidization (moving) of the psa molecular sieve bed during the entire adsorption and desorption process and under any possible working condition of the NITROSWING and OXYSWING PSA generators.

Extensive CFD simulations and running tests have been performed in order to remain distant from the physical fluidization limit for each adsorber vessel size and under all process circumstances.

Thanks to extensive in-house CFD and FEM simulations of process flows and mechanical designs, IGS' engineers also managed to develop the extremely compact gas distribution system FlatFlow for the modular PSA generators. The FlatFlow technology makes it possible to turn a horizontal feed gas flow into a vertical and uniformly distributed gas flow over the entire molecular sieve bed section within an extremely limited space. Despite these limited dimensions, the FlatFlow technology even results into a superior bed utilization compared to conventional gas distribution systems.

This break-through made it finally possible to develop a compact, highly efficient and truly flexible PSA generator. The FlatFlow technology from IGS is protected by several international patents.