Brief History of Air Separation

Thread Content

Brief history of air separation: Germany was the first country in the world to use air liquefaction and separation technology. As early as 1891, the German company Linde began conducting research on air liquefaction in laboratories. A few years later, it established a workshop for manufacturing cryogenic equipment, and in 1903 it produced the world’s first air separation unit with a production capacity of 10 m3/h of oxygen. Due to limitations in production capacity at that time, the oxygen produced before the 1930s was used only in industries such as gas cutting and gas welding. After the 1950s, as air separation units gradually increased in number and tended to become of medium size, along with the rapid development of technologies in the steelmaking and fertilizer industries, air separation equipment became increasingly large-scale, which promoted the growth of the industry manufacturing such equipment. After nearly a century of continuous development, the air separation process has now evolved into large-scale fully low-pressure systems. To date, the highest oxygen production capacity of air separation units in operation worldwide is 122,500 m3 (standard) per hour.