Modeling and Simulation of an Industrial Hydrogen Purification Unit inPressure Swing Adsorption Process

Pressure swing adsorption (PSA) is one of the most economic technologies,to produce high purity hydrogen with high performance. PSA is an energy-efficient alternative for separation of hydrogenfrom reforming products. In this work, simulation of an industrial PSA process with double-layercolumns is developed for purification of hydrogen from methane steam reforming product, containing H2, CO2, CH4, CO and N2 gaseous mixture. The dual-sorbent PSAbed consists of aninitial layer of activated carbon for trapping CO2, CH4 and a subsequent layer of zeolite (5A) forremoving CO and N2. This simulation package consists of nine different steps such as; adsorption,two stages equalization in desorption mode, providing purge,dump, purge, two equalization stagesfor adsorption and repressurization by product. The mass and momentum balances along the timeand length of the packed beds aresimultaneousely resolved by MATLAB programming. By using the result of simulation, fraction of hydrogen product, recovery of hydrogen, pressure profile of the column at different steps, mass transfer zone of the impurities, loading profile of impurities atdifferent steps and velocity profile of the gas phase are reported.The simulation results present good agreement with the actual industrial results of the outlet hydrogen purity as close as 100% and recovery of outlet hydrogen as 71%.

کلیدواژه ها:

H2 purification ، Pressure swing adsorption ، Modeling ، Simulation