Argon (Ar) is a critical element for industries that include stainless steel production, metal fabrication and lighting manufacture.
As demand increases across these sectors, improving the amount of recoverable Ar from air separation units (ASU) is a commercial necessity – even a 1% increase in Ar recovery can be worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Produced through the fractional distillation of liquid air, the most effective way of improving Ar production yield within the air separation process is to accurately control the balance of the mixture transferred from the first distillation column to the second distillation column. That said, while the objective is to get as much Ar within the mixture as possible, a maximised Ar output is theoretically unachievable since it includes the presence of nitrogen (N2).
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