Abstract
Pressure swing adsorption (PSA) is a cyclic adsorption process for gas separation and purification. PSA offers a broad range of design possibilities influencing the device behaviour. In the last decade much attention has been devoted towards simulation and optimisation of various PSA cycles. The PSA beds are modelled with hyperbolic/parabolic partial differential algebraic equations and the separation performance should be assessed at cyclic steady state (CSS). Detailed mathematical models together with the CSS constraint makes design difficult. We propose a surrogate based optimisation procedure based on kriging for the design of PSA systems. The numerical implementation is tested with a genetic algorithm, with a multi-start sequential quadratic programming method and with an efficient global optimisation algorithm. The case study is the design of a dual piston PSA system for the separation of a binary gas mixture of N-2 and CO2.