ABSTRACT
Separating raw natural gas into marketable products is at the heart of natural gas processing. This chapter provides an overview of separation processes used in gas processing. These processes utilize differences in volatility, solubility, chemical reactivity, and molecular size to obtain the desired separation. A simple binary mixture is used to illustrate how the distillation process works. The chapter briefly discusses ideal and nonideal mixtures and then gives an overview of distillation columns. Next, the concepts of both physical and chemical absorption processes are covered. This is followed by a discussion of column internals and which applications use each type of internals. The chapter then discusses physical adsorption and both temperature and pressure swing adsorption. Finally, the basic concepts of membranes, along with types of membrane construction, are covered. A guide to applicability of separation processes, excluding distillation, is provided. The chapter excludes quantitative design equations.
