An alternate mathematical approach to recover hydrogen with high permeate purity from gas streams of small-medium level oil refineries

Gas separation processes play a vital role in many industries like hydrogen recovery,air separation,natural gas dehydration. membrane based gas separation processes offer a great potential for these industrial applications because of their environmental friendliness,energy efficiency and ease of scale up. mathematical modeling of membrane based gas separation process can help to predict the performance of such separation processes. in this study,a numerical method is proposed by comparing different numerical techniques which are used to solve model equations of co-current flow. numerical methods such as bogacki-shampine method,dormand-prince method,adams- bashforth-moulton method,numerical differentiation formulas,modified rosenbrock formula of order 2,trapezoidal rule with free interpolant and trapezoidal rule with backward difference formula of order 2 are used to solve the system of coupled nonlinear differential equations. this approach is used for the first time in a multicomponent membrane based gas separation process. this technique requires least computational time,improved solution stability and has been validated for the separation of hydrogen from multicomponent gas mixture. this numerical technique helps to predict the concentration of hydrogen in reject (retentate) and permeate streams. the simulation results show good agreement with experimental data.