Developments in Cryogenic Technology

Presented at January 1989 Technical Meeting
By: Harry Isalski, Costain Engineering
Cryogenics is a mature technology which finds increasing competition from permeation and adsorption. This paper outlines the developments made in cryogenic technology over the past 20 years ensuring its place in todays competitive field of gas separation.The purpose of the paper is to identify areas of significant improvements in recent cryogenic processes and equipment and to highlight the merits of such processes compared with other technologies.This paper covers two areas. The first is the development of equipment applied to cryogenic plant including heat exchangers, compressors, expanders and distillation equipment. The second covers the use of novel cryogenics technology in a variety of applications including recovery of hydrogen and LPG's from refinery off-gases and natural gas.The reduction of energy in low temperature processing is an important feature of many such techniques. The application of low energy processes is considered. Natural gas processing includes dewpoint control, LPG extraction, Ethane extraction, LNG production, denitrogenation and helium extraction. Expander technology is widely used for the purposes of LPG extraction and liquefaction of natural gas. Novel ref luxing exchanger technology is qualitatively compared to expander technology illustrating the merits of high efficiency processes.