Comparative study on pressure swing adsorption system for industrial hydrogen and fuel cell hydrogen

In order to improve the design of PSA system for fuel cell hydrogen production, a non-isothermal model of eight-bed PSA hydrogen process with five-component (H2/N2/CH4/CO/CO2 = 74.59%/0.01%/4.2%/2.5%/18.7% (vol)) four-stage pressure equalization was developed in this article. The model adopts a composite adsorption bed of activated carbon and zeolite 5A. In this article, pressure variation, temperature field and separation performance are stimulated, and also effect of providing purge (PP) differential pressure and the ratio of activated carbon to zeolite 5A on separation performance in the process of producing industrial hydrogen (CO content in hydrogen is 10 µl·L−1) and fuel cell hydrogen (CO content is 0.2 µl·L−1) are compared. The results show that Run 3, when the CO content in hydrogen is 10 µl·L−1, the hydrogen recovery is 89.8%, and the average flow rate of feed gas is 0.529 mol·s−1; When the CO content in hydrogen is 0.2 µl·L−1, the hydrogen recovery is 85.2%, and the average flow rate of feed gas is 0.43 mol·s−1. With the increase of PP differential pressure, hydrogen recovery first increases and then decreases, reaching the maximum when PP differential pressure is 0.263 MPa; With the decrease of the ratio of activated carbon to zeolite 5A, the hydrogen recovery increases gradually. When the CO content in hydrogen is 0.2 µl·L−1 the hydrogen recovery increases more obviously, from 83.96% to 86.37%, until the ratio of activated carbon to zeolite 5A decreases to 1. At the end of PP step, no large amount of CO2 in gas or solid phase enters the zeolite 5A adsorption bed, while when the CO content in hydrogen is 10 µl·L−1, and the ratio of carbon to zeolite 5A is less than 1.4, more CO2 will enter the zeolite 5A bed.