A Study on Pressure Swing Adsorption for Gas Separation

Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) is extensively used separation technique for bulk separation of various gas mixture, air separation, gas drying, methane purification from natural and biogas. Due to its multiplicative applications researcher around the world have been working to improve this technique further. More specifically, PSA is an adsorption based separation technique, where an adsorbent preferentially adsorb one component from a feed mixture thereby achieving the required separation. PSA has cyclic nature which arises due to repetition of the involved high pressure adsorption phase followed by low pressure regeneration phase. Different adsorbents such as activated carbon, zeolites, mesoporous silica material etc have been used so far. The adsorbent material employed in PSA process is extremely important in defining its properties however; process engineering can also improve the performance of PSA significantly. The paper provides an overview of PSA technique along with a review of various approaches that has been proposed till now for amelioration of PSA's performance.