The Boc Group, Inc.

Edwards Limited

Julian Richard Dean

Ravi Kumar Jain

Andrew James Seeley

Christopher Mark Bailey

Robert Bruce Grant

Paul Alan Stockman

Andrew John Harpham

Joanne Rachel Greenwood

Neil Condon

William R Gerristead, Jr

Zachary William Dunbar

Naum Perelman

Stephen Bruce Cottle

A system comprising a pumping system configured to pump respective exhaust gases from each of a plurality of chemical etching process chambers and to combine the exhaust gases to provide a combined exhaust gas, and a noble gas recovery system configured to process the combined exhaust gas to remove one or more noble gases therefrom.

Noble gas recovery system

A method is described for recovering a noble gas, such as xenon or krypton, from a first gas mixture comprising a plurality of components, one of which is the noble gas and the others are typically helium and/or nitrogen, argon, and relatively light fluorocarbons. The gas mixture is first conveyed to a gas chromatography column for separating the noble gas from the other components of the gas mixture. As the noble gas travels relatively slowly through the column, the other components are exhausted from the column before the relatively slow noble gas. Following the exhaust of these other components, a purge gas is supplied to the column to flush the noble gas therefrom. A second gas mixture comprising the noble gas and the purge gas is conveyed from the column to a membrane separator to separate the second gas mixture into a noble gas-rich gas stream and a purge gas-rich gas stream, which may be recirculated back to the column for re-use.

Treatment of effluent gases

Growing community of inventors

Burgess Hill, United Kingdom

Julian Richard Dean