The most economical form of oxygen supply for environmental applications is, in general, an on-site oxygen generation system. These systems are highly reliable and have been supplying oxygen economically and safely to treatment facilities ranging in size from one to 500 million gallons per day. Two basic types of technology are employed to separate oxygen from air. Adsorption type systems are generally used for small to medium size plants. Cryogenic type systems are used for larger size plants. For some special cases, including small treatment plants, liquid oxygen may be delivered to and stored on the site.
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Linde PP
Linde Process Plants (Tulsa,OK) and M2T Technologies are affiliated.
offers three oxygen supply options, consisting of Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) Systems, Vacuum Swing Adsorption (VSA) Sys-tems and Cryogenic Sys-tems. The choice of system depends on a number of fac-tors, including space avail-able, quantity of oxygen re-quired, oxygen demand vari-ations and utility costs. All of these oxygen supply systems can be operated in a turn-down mode yielding cost sav-ings when not operating at full capacity. They are all very reliable with unscheduled downtime averaging less than about one percent.
The PSA System is generally applicable for systems requiring less than about 30 tons per day of oxygen. As shown in Figure 1, ambient air is compressed and flows to a vessel that contains a molecular sieve adsorbent. The adsorbent selectively re-moves water, carbon dioxide and most of the nitrogen pro-ducing a high purity oxygen gas (typically 90%) from the adsorber vessel. Once the adsorbent is loaded with im-purities the adsorber bed is depressurized to atmospheric pressure whereby the impurities are removed from the adsorbent in preparation for the next adsorption cycle.