Headwaters Solutions - H2 Pressure Swing Adsorption

Hydrogen Pressure

Swing Adsorption

Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA), invented in the 1960s, has revolutionized the production of purified hydrogen worldwide with over 1,500 total plants constructed. Decades of competing investment have yielded a huge number of technical advances, making the engineering of PSA plants fundamentally an “open book” process like steam reforming, but extremely complex to do correctly, and highly dependent on the technical skill of the supplier.

Headwaters principals have been engaged in the PSA market for over 20 years, and have been granted eight U.S. Patents. Our PSA plants utilize the fewest adsorber beds and lowest number of switching valves in the industry for equivalent capacity and performance, and have demonstrated run times up to five years between valve overhauls. This innately low complexity assures greater reliability and less costly operations and maintenance, critical technological advantages for smaller plants: 20 MMscf/day and below. We have completed 35 H2 PSA plants worldwide, with capacities up to 50 tonne/day in challenging applications with high purity up to 99.9999% and hydrogen recovery matching the best worldwide benchmarks, i.e. up to 88% in steam reforming applications.

We fundamentally believe that any customer interested in a H2 PSA plant demand:

Switching valves from internationally-recognized manufacturers proven to deliver 5 years between turnaround
Ability to operate with one adsorber vessel offline for maintenance
Load following and product purity control
Complete Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of adsorber vessels
The most advanced adsorbents, which deliver higher purity and lower overall system cost

After a professional relationship spanning two decades, Zeochem and Headwaters Solutions LLC have partnered to supply new H2 PSA units worldwide, and to provide advanced revamp services to extend H2 PSAU product recovery and purity. Leveraging Zeochem's unique capabilities in high adsorption capacity zeolites for critical impurities and Headwaters' extensive experience in building H2 PSA units and developing innovations in PSA control and fabrication, the H2 PSA's supplied through our global partnership equal or exceed the highest known performance standards.

Because increased H2 recovery directly increases steam reformer plant output capacity AND reduces feedstock consumption, PSA replacement offers a natural way to improve existing hydrogen plant performance in a revamp.