Determination Method Research Of Oxygen And Argon Gas Mixture From Air Separation Plant

A48000m3/h air separation unit of Sinopec Hubei Chemical Fertilizer wasstarted running at the end of2006. During operation, needs an accurate analysis aboutpure nitrogen of the cooling device,nitrogen in lower tower, oxygen in upper tower in,purity of liquid air and other components content of process section. It is mainlymixture including oxygen and argon gas. It is extremely important for us to know thestatus of process equipments and clearly understand the balance parameters oflogistics.It makes the device operation safe and stable. Although there are many typesof analysis on the mixture of oxygen and argon, we choose different analysisaccording to the contents of tested components and types of impurities. Thesemethods can be divided into direct measuring method and indirect measuring method.Direct method is to directly detect the oxygen content. Indirect measuring method forthe determination of oxygen content is to firstly detect argon content and then get theoxygen content by subtraction. But these methods are not ideal. For mixedcomponents containing oxygen and argon gas, we generally use gas chromatographyanalysis. Zeolite sorbent or polymer stationary phase is used as separation column.However, because of extreme difficulty of separating oxygen and argon and there arealso some problems on low sensitivity if we apply low temperature or increase thecolumn length separating oxygen and argon. This study is to find a cheap and easilyobtained deoxidizer. This deoxidizer can react with oxygen during the gaschromatography analysis on mixed oxygen and argon gas. So as to achieve thepurpose of high efficiency deoxygenation and establish new chromatography analysiswhich is used to detect argon content in oxygen-argon gas.