Gas separation by pressure swing adsorption for producing hydrogen from coal: Final report

This project demonstrated the feasibility of producing high purity hydrogen from a coal gasification product gas mixture by Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) using a commercial 5A zeolite as the adsorbent. The major advantage of PSA over conventional hydrogen upgrading processes is associated with lower overall production costs. This is mainly due to the integration of PSA into H/sub 2/ production plants as a single unit operation by replacing the low temperature carbon monoxide shift, carbon dioxide wash and methanation steps. In this way, hydrogen production costs are typically reduced from 7 to 40%. A single bed PSA process was designed to simulate the various steps of commercial multibed PSA plants. A new and very important step, ''Vacuum Purge'', was also investigated. 45 refs., 38 figs., 50 tabs.