EXPERIMENT III. MEMBRANE GAS SEPARATION

Objectives: The purposes of this experiment are to determine the capability of membranes to separate air into nitrogen- and oxygen-rich streams and to become familiar with computer acquisition of data and the dynamic behavior of continuous systems.

Overall Operation

Air may be introduced into the tube-side of the permeator at different pressures and flow rates. Oxygen selectively permeates through the walls of the the hollow fibers of two units operating individually or in series. One separator, P1, operates in either co- or counter-current flow, and the other separator, P2, operates only in counter-current flow. Data from the oxygen analyzers, mass flow meter and pressure transducer are acquired and displayed by the data acquisition hardware and software of the computer.  The data acquisition program is initiated by double clicking on the "MEMBRANE" icon on the desktop.  In addition to the data displayed on the screen, each "run" writes a data file in the directory c:\data . The file name is sepxy.dat, where x and y are a sequential run number and the date.