Re: A bit of chemical engineering

Rob Ellwood <rob.ellwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@xxxxxxxxx> clashed his tentacles
together, gibbered briefly, and wrote:

You start out with a blob of gas that's mostly CO2 with a little
nitrogen. You want to end up with pure nitrogen, carbon
monoxide, and excess oxygen. What's the simplest way to achieve
that?

And, in a later post, Logan said:

The purpose is to figure out the easiest way to produce nitrogen
as lifting gas for a (preferably unmanned) balloon, and carbon
monoxide as additional lifting gas and fuel.

Background: Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) is a cheap
and simple way to separate gases. You end up with two streams,

I've seen oxygen machines which produce pure(?) oxygen from air, by
pumping it through something - an artificial zeolite, I think. I thought
it was like some kind of molecular sized filter. Is this the same as
what you are describing?

For the CO2: depressure to 1 atm + the pressure drops in
the later processing steps. You can use the depressuring step to
give you most of the energy for the pressuring step. (Two turbines
on the same shaft. IIRC, this is a "regenerative compressor".)

The simplest process requires biotechnology and handwavium:

I disagree: the simplest way to convert CO2 to CO + O2 is to heat it.[*]
At high enough temperatures, the more stable form is CO rather than CO2
- of course, there would be an equilibrium, but if you quenched this
equilibrium mixture, you'd get a mix of all three gases. Separation of
the CO2 would be easy via chemical means or refrigeration. Separating O2
and CO would be harder, but for a lifting gas, would you need to?

If so, presumably the physical methods mentioned earlier could be used.

--
Jonathan L Cunningham
.

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