Distillation of methane from a methane-containing crude gas
AssigneeLinde Aktiengesellschaft
InventorsPeter Grimm, Peter Burr
Life of this patent
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Abstract
In the separation in a rectification column of methane and optionally lower-boiling components from a methane-containing crude gas, which gas contains additionally higher-boiling hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, or mixtures thereof, wherein an auxiliary cycle containing a fluid medium is employed for the production of cooling to produce reflux liquid at the head of the rectifying column, an improvement is provided wherein liquid in the rectifying column positioned above the column sump and below the column head, is vaporized in indirect heat exchange with condensing cycle medium.
Claims6
In a separation in a rectification column of methane and optionally lower-boiling components from a methane-containing crude gas, which gas contains additionally higher-boiling hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, or mixtures thereof, wherein an auxiliary cycle containing a fluid medium is employed for the production of cooling to produce reflux liquid at the head of the rectifying column, the improvement wherein liquid in the rectifying column located in the region of plates numbers 0.4 x-0.6 x, wherein x is the number of theoretical plates in the column, is vaporized in indirect heat exchange with condensing auxiliary cycle medium, without said condensing auxiliary cycle medium reboiling the bottoms, and reboiling the bottoms with feed to the rectification column without indirect heat exchange in said region of plates.
In the separation in a rectification column of methane and optionally lower-boiling components from a methane-containing crude gas, which gas contains additionally higher-boiling hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, or mixtures thereof, wherein an auxiliary cycle containing a fluid medium is employed for the production of cooling to produce reflux liquid at the head of the rectifying column located in the region of plates numbers 0.4 x-0.6 x, wherein x is the number of theoretical plates in the column, is vaporized in indirect heat exchange with condensing auxiliary cycle medium, wherein an open auxiliary cycle is utilized wherein gaseous product methane is expanded and combined with the auxiliary cycle medium which has been expanded after passage through the liquid vaporization operation;
- the mixture of the two sources of methane being used as heat exchange medium to produce the reflux liquid at the column head, and subsequently being divided into two flows, one forming the product gas and the other subsequently being compressed and used as a heat exchange medium to vaporize the reflux liquid.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.