A simplified digital twin of a pressure swing adsorption plant for air separation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Dhamanekar, Abhijit, Das, Ritwik, Ansumali, Santosh, Vysyaraju, Raviraju, Rajendran, Arvind, V., Diwakar S.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Dhamanekar, Abhijit
Das, Ritwik
Ansumali, Santosh
Vysyaraju, Raviraju
Rajendran, Arvind
V., Diwakar S.
author_facet Dhamanekar, Abhijit
Das, Ritwik
Ansumali, Santosh
Vysyaraju, Raviraju
Rajendran, Arvind
V., Diwakar S.
contents The pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process is one of the widely utilized techniques for air separation. Operating on the Skarstrom cycle, the porous adsorbent columns of a PSA system alternate between adsorption and desorption phases to selectively enrich the desired component in a gas mixture. The current work presents a robust and generalizable digital twin CFD model of a PSA system that can significantly help in design and device characterization. Using an axisymmetric representation, the digital twin accurately mimics all the key components of an air separation plant, including the air reservoir, adsorbent columns, product buffer tank, pressure regulator, solenoidal valves, and mesh filters. The model simulates the flow and adsorption processes in the system by solving the conservation equations for mass, momentum, energy, and species, along with the equation for adsorption kinetics. The cyclic operation of the PSA plants, typically controlled by solenoid valves, is emulated by dynamically modifying the boundary conditions of different subdomains. Such an integrated approach is shown here to closely replicate the performance of an in-house PSA pilot setup producing oxygen in terms of purity and pressure transience. Also, both the numerical and the experimental results yield an optimum performance for the same process parameters, such as pressurization time (26 s), purge time (2 s), and equalization time (4 s). The proposed numerical model is versatile and can be adapted to various industrial applications of PSA technology, such as hydrogen purification and carbon capture. Thus, it offers a cost-effective tool for designing and optimizing PSA systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A simplified digital twin of a pressure swing adsorption plant for air separation
Dhamanekar, Abhijit
Das, Ritwik
Ansumali, Santosh
Vysyaraju, Raviraju
Rajendran, Arvind
V., Diwakar S.
Fluid Dynamics
The pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process is one of the widely utilized techniques for air separation. Operating on the Skarstrom cycle, the porous adsorbent columns of a PSA system alternate between adsorption and desorption phases to selectively enrich the desired component in a gas mixture. The current work presents a robust and generalizable digital twin CFD model of a PSA system that can significantly help in design and device characterization. Using an axisymmetric representation, the digital twin accurately mimics all the key components of an air separation plant, including the air reservoir, adsorbent columns, product buffer tank, pressure regulator, solenoidal valves, and mesh filters. The model simulates the flow and adsorption processes in the system by solving the conservation equations for mass, momentum, energy, and species, along with the equation for adsorption kinetics. The cyclic operation of the PSA plants, typically controlled by solenoid valves, is emulated by dynamically modifying the boundary conditions of different subdomains. Such an integrated approach is shown here to closely replicate the performance of an in-house PSA pilot setup producing oxygen in terms of purity and pressure transience. Also, both the numerical and the experimental results yield an optimum performance for the same process parameters, such as pressurization time (26 s), purge time (2 s), and equalization time (4 s). The proposed numerical model is versatile and can be adapted to various industrial applications of PSA technology, such as hydrogen purification and carbon capture. Thus, it offers a cost-effective tool for designing and optimizing PSA systems.
title A simplified digital twin of a pressure swing adsorption plant for air separation
topic Fluid Dynamics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02268