Krypton Recycling

KryptonØ has been designed to recover, purify and recycle high value inert purge gases used in the flat glass coating market. Typically multiple coatings are applied to flat glass using plasma enhanced coating technologies under vacuum to achieve the specific light transmission/reflection, self-cleaning capabilities etc. that is required. For certain coatings the plasma process requires heavy inert gases such as Krypton to be used to facilitate the coating process and while only low flows of the order of 1 slpm are used the extraordinarily high cost of krypton makes recycle an economic imperative.

Krypton is an extremely rare gas that is, like argon, extracted from air during the cryogenic distillation process used to produce liquid oxygen and nitrogen etc. Krypton makes up only 1ppm of the earth’s atmosphere, compared to argon at 1,000ppm (1%), making it approximately 1,000 times as expensive as argon.

By replacing gas purge cycles during regeneration with vacuum cycles, the KryptonØ is designed to achieve an operating recycle rate of approaching 100% – even higher than the ArgonØ! The KryptonØ can be configured to remove % levels of oxygen or % levels of combustible gases depending on the application. The technology can be applied to other rare gases such as xenon, neon and helium.