EFFICIENCY OF THE PROCESS OF CRYOGENIC AIR SEPARATION INTO THE COMPONENTS

The separation process of atmospheric air into its components by means of cryogenic low-pressure procedure, which takes place in the Oxygen plant in the Copper Mining and Smelting Complex, yields various products of different quantities and purities. Proper assessment of the energy consumption, hence assignments production cost of individual products may present considerable problem. For that goal, the least invested technical operation was adopted as criteria, and was restrained for all costs of production and distribution of specific energy. Case study was carried out in the Oxygen factory by monitoring producing parameters for the process in the 2007 year. Based on the monitoring of production parameters and their costs for 20 months in the period 2004-2005, correlation equations for power consumption in the total monthly amount and per mass of produced gaseous oxygen were created. The energy and exergy efficiency of the air separation process into the components are expressed as the ratio of input and useful energy and exergy of the process. On the basis of the adopted criteria, the assignments of energy consumption and production costs for cryogenic air separation process into the components are as follows: 82.59% for gaseous oxygen, 14.04% for liquid oxygen, 1.39% for gaseous nitrogen and 1.98% for liquefied nitrogen. The air separation efficiency is achieved in the amount of energy 0.0872-0.1179 and exergy 0.0537-0.1247. Power consumption per mass of the products in 2007 year is 1325.059 kWh/t of liquid oxygen, 828.765 kWh/t of liquid nitrogen, 429.812 kWh/t of gaseous oxygen and 309.424 kWh/t of nitrogen gas. Production costs of the technical gases at the dawn of the factory are: 6730.69 RSD/t of liquid oxygen, 4209.74 RSD/t of liquid nitrogen, 2183.25 RSD/t of gaseous oxygen and 1571.73 RSD/t of gaseous nitrogen.