Recent trends in pressure swing adsorption: Production of multiple products from a multicomponent feed gas

Recent pressure swing adsorption (PSA) processes are designed to produce multiple product gases of high purity and recovery from binary or multicomponent feed gases. Processes are also designed to alter the composition of a feed gas mixture. One example of these new processes is described and its performance reported. The commercial adsorbents used in these processes come from a large family of generic adsorbents like zeolites, activated carbons, silica and alumina gels, etc. Most of these adsorbents are energetically very heterogeneous. This makes a priori design of these processes extremely difficult and experimental process performance data are needed. Several fundamental problems on this subject are discussed.