Simulation of working process of oxygen concentrator equipment by pressure swing adsorption

Abstract

Oxygen is essential for human respiration and the existence of all living organisms. Medically it is used to treat diseases related to impaired respiratory function. In industrial scale, gaseous oxygen is separated from the air by liquefaction and fractional distillation techniques, while on a small and medium scale oxygen is usually separated by using zeolite molecular sieves and pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for oxygen concentrators (PSA type) for personal and family use is very high. However, there isn’t any Vietnamese factory for production oxygen concentrator, so it is imported from abroad. In this paper, a pilot-scale oxygen concentrator was built at the Department of chemical process equipment, Hanoi University of Science and Technology. The operation of the device has been simulated and optimized on Aspen Adsorption software. The optimization parameters obtained will be used to design the equipment in industrial scale.