Due to the increasing global demand for industrial gas

the development of large-scale cryogenic air separation systems has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Increasing the height of the adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber used in cryogenic air separation systems may efficiently increase the treatment capacity of the air in the adsorber. However

uniformity of the flow distribution of the air inside the adsorber would be deteriorated using the height-increasing method. In order to reduce the non-uniformity of the flow distribution caused by the excessive height of adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber

a novel parallel connection method is proposed in the present work. The experimental apparatus is designed and constructed; the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique is used to develop a CFD-based model

which is used to analyze the flow distribution

the static pressure drop and the radial velocity in the newly designed adsorber. In addition

the geometric parameters of annular flow channels and the adsorption bed thickness of the upper unit in the parallelconnected vertical radial flow adsorber are optimized

so that the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously. Comparisons are made between the height-increasing method and the parallel connection method with the same adsorber height. It is shown that using the parallel connection method could reduce the difference between the maximum and minimum radial static pressure drop by 86.2% and improve the uniformity by 80% compared with those of using the height-increasing method. The optimal thickness ratio of the upper and lower adsorption units is obtained as 0.966

in which case the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously

so that the adsorbents in adsorption space could be used more efficiently.