Hydrogen Purification Performance Optimization of Vacuum Pressure Swing Adsorption on Different Activated Carbons

Abstract

Hydrogen purification is an important part of hydrogen energy utilization. This study aimed to perform hydrogen purification of multi-component gas (H2/CO2/CH4/CO/N2 = 0.79/0.17/0.021/0.012/0.007) by one-column vacuum pressure swing adsorption (VPSA) and pressure swing adsorption (PSA). AC5-KS was selected as the adsorbent for hydrogen purification due to its greater adsorption capacity compared to R2030. Furthermore, VPSA and PSA 10-step cycle models were established to simulate the hydrogen purification process using the Aspen Adsorption platform. The simulation results showed that the hydrogen purification performance of VPSA is better than that of PSA on AC5-KS adsorbent. The effects of feeding time and purging time on hydrogen purity and recovery were also discussed. Results showed that feeding time has a negative effect on hydrogen purity and a positive effect on hydrogen recovery, while purging time has a positive effect on hydrogen purity and a negative effect on hydrogen recovery. By using an artificial neural network (ANN), the relationship between the inputs (feeding time and purging time) and outputs (hydrogen purity and recovery) was established. Based on the ANN, the interior point method was applied to optimize hydrogen purification performance. Considering two optimization cases, the optimized feeding time and purging time were obtained. The optimization results showed that the maximum hydrogen recovery reached 88.65% when the feeding time was 223 s and the purging time was 96 s. The maximum hydrogen purity reached 99.33% when the feeding time was 100 s and the purging time was 45 s.

Sustainable valorisation of food waste into engineered biochars for CO2 capture towards a circular economy

“…Moreover, more complex VPSA configurations have been devised to solve specific problems. For example, Xiao et al 78 developed a 10-step VPSA cycle for H 2 purification, which contains several additional steps of pressure equalisation compared with the basic VPSA. They employed commercial engineered biochars as CO 2 adsorbents for evaluating H 2 separation performance, and also they compared the performance of various engineered biochars in different process configurations (i.e., PSA and VPSA).…”

A Review of Numerical Research on the Pressure Swing Adsorption Process

“…In order to solve large-scale nonlinear programming problems, which have a large number of equationally constrained equations but relatively low degrees of freedom, the reduced-space SQP (r-SQP) algorithm is proposed. The r-SQP can greatly reduce the amount of calculation and storage capacity of the optimization process through a spatial-decomposition technique that solves the process system in zero space, with relatively small degrees of freedom [31]. Currently, the algorithm has been successfully applied in nitrogen/methane separation, biogas upgrading, carbon capture, and other processes.…”

“…Gradient-based deterministic algorithms include sequential quadratic programming (SQP), reduced space sequential quadratic programming (rSQP), the interior point method, the efficient set method, the trust region efficient algorithm, etc. [30][31][32]. Novel metaheuristic and artificial-intelligence-based optimization algorithms, including the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), the ant colony algorithm, the annealing algorithm, etc.…”

“…Novel metaheuristic and artificial-intelligence-based optimization algorithms, including the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), the ant colony algorithm, the annealing algorithm, etc. Among these, GA and PSO are typical metaheuristic algorithms, which have demonstrated superior performance and efficiency in multiple reports [31,33,34]. Currently, the research on PSA process optimization shows a clear trend toward a more intelligent, easier, and integrated direction.…”

Optimization of hydrogen purification from biomass‐derived syngas via water gas shift reaction integrated with vacuum pressure swing adsorption for energy storage

“…Among the adsorption process configurations, vacuum pressure swing adsorption (VPSA) is widely adopted for gas separation due to its high productivity, long adsorbent life, and easy operation. Compared with conventional PSA, a better purification performance can be obtained from VPSA 20 . In the study by Streb and Mazzotti, 21 a two‐column VPSA process was built to purify H 2 from a CO 2 /H 2 /CH 4 mixture using high adsorption pressure.…”