Praxair Technology, Inc.

Olivier Dube

Minish Mahendra Shah

Joseph Michael Schwartz

Cem E Celik

Werner Leitmayr

Marian Simo

Keith A Craigie

Ana Arevalo-Hidalgo

Thomas A McNamara

Paul R Munsterman

The present invention is directed to a method and system of purifying hydrogen supplied from a storage cavern, particularly to removing methane and other hydrocarbons from the hydrogen withdrawn from the cavern by using selective adsorption. The adsorbed impurities can be removed from the adsorbent by increasing the temperature, reducing the pressure, or a combination of both.

Method of purifying hydrogen supplied from a storage cavern

The present invention relates to a method of controlling prepurifier cycle time by monitoring ambient COlevel in order to prevent CObreakthrough occurrences caused by extreme instantaneous variations in ambient COlevel. Rather than operating solely by prepurifier design bed capacity, the method of the invention continuously updates bed capacity for the contaminants using the feed temperature, pressure and contaminants composition, calculating the total amount of contaminants that were fed to the prepurifier during the feed step and estimates the perturbation front velocity, i.e., the velocity at which the contaminants front coming from an extreme instantaneous variations of ambient level is going to propagate inside the adsorbents bed. Estimating the perturbation front velocity allows for a more precise estimate of the maximum time remaining for the feed step before starting to experience CObreakthrough. This eliminates the need to switch the online bed unnecessarily early and risking shorter regeneration for the offline bed.

Control of swing adsorption process cycle time with ambient COmonitoring

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Amherst, NY, United States of America

Olivier Dube