Abstract
This paper, inspired by the success of adsorptive air separation in big scale (up to 250 tons/day), looks into the possibility of replacing cryogenic distillation with adsorptive separation, and thus improving the downstream processing of OCM. This results in a new process concept. For this purpose, a plug flow model of fixed-bed adsorber was developed and several separation schemes were investigated via simulation. Among them, the simultaneously separation of ethylene and carbon dioxide using zeolite 4A is found realizable. The results show that by switching from cryogenic distillation to adsorption, separation cost can be significantly reduced.