In February 2021, the VPSA oxygen plant built by PKU PIONEER in ChangShu LongTeng Special Steel Co., Ltd. (Longteng Special Steel) entered the test run phase and was officially put into operation before Feb 10th,2021 after several months of hurried construction.

Longteng Special Steel's medium and long-term strategic planning project for cost reduction and efficiency improvement requires to construct a 30,000Nm3/h oxygen unit to provide oxygen for two 1080m3 blast furnaces. The oxygen plant project was launched in March 2020 and built by PKU Pioneer in two phases (separately 22,500Nm3/h and 7,500Nm3/h VPSA oxygen generating units), of which the first one has been put into operation in October 2020. With the second unit put into operation before Feb 10th,2021, it will be united to be a large 30,000/80 combined VPSA oxygen system as one of the largest VPSA oxygen plants in China. The project will help Longteng Special Steel achieve the firm target of reaching $4642 million in revenue and creating $618 million in profits and taxes within 3 years.

According to Longteng Special Steel, the bid determination of the VPSA oxygen production project was in early 2020 when traffic was blocked in many districts and mandatory quarantine control measures were implemented, which caused great resistance to multi-party technical exchanges on the project, therefore, the steel mill omitted the on-the-spot investigation and handed over the project to PKU Pioneer for construction, hence the two sides have established a highly trusted foundation for cooperation. In this project, PKU Pioneer is responsible for overall design, complete equipment supply, installation and commissioning, on-site construction management, instrument and control software programming, system debugging for oxygen production, production and operation optimization, etc., providing one-stop EPC services for Longteng Special Steel. Referring to PKU Pioneer's suggestions on oxygen supply, Longteng Special Steel adopted the intelligent oxygen enrichment control technology before the blast furnace blower to achieve the low-cost enriched oxygen supply by working as an oxygen enrichment partner together with the original on-site oxygen pipe network after the blast furnace blower, complementing each other and offering flexible oxygen backup.

With the tight land in the factory, PKU Pioneer carried out the plane layout in a limited space of 64m×24m and realized the single-layer placement of the 30,000/80 VPSA oxygen plant with the maintenance space ensured. Compared with the double-layer layout, the civil construction investment is greatly reduced and it is easier to control the noise of the VPSA oxygen equipment.

In terms of the selection of oxygen supply mode, Longteng Special Steel also took the cost reduction advice given by PKU Pioneer. The oxygen was originally offered by a third party with no experience in operating oxygen production equipment. VPSA oxygen generation process is the optimal process for supplemental oxygen supply in steel mills considering the high automation of the process, the oxygen system can be basically unattended, thus lowering the threshold of operation and maintenance experience requirements for operators and solving the problem of post allocation. In addition, setting signal interlock between the oxygen generator and blast furnace blower can realize smart and safe oxygen consumption. Based on the energy consumption calculation of the oxygen plant in operation by the person in charge of Longteng Special Steel oxygen production project, the comprehensive oxygen cost, including depreciation, labor, water and electricity, is less than $0.05/Nm³ (100% oxygen), which is $0.03/Nm³ lower than that of gas supply mode, saving at least $5.88 million per year. On the other hand, the output improvement, coke ratio reduction as well as coal gas power generation increase can all be achieved by improving the oxygen enrichment rate of the blast furnace, as a result, the annual comprehensive benefits will exceed $15 million.

It is reported that Longteng Special Steel, with a revenue of $4039 million in 2019, is the first local enterprise in Changshu with a tax amount exceeding $154 million. Now it has become the largest domestic production base with an annual output of 3.5 million tons of marine special steel, high-strength prestressed concrete steel bars and hot-rolled and hot-forged high-quality wear-resistant steel balls. All the 3 leading products have won the national "single champion" and been listed in the second batch of National Single Champion Demonstration Enterprises in Manufacturing Industry by the National Development and Reform Commission.

In recent years, the application of the VPSA oxygen production process in blast furnace oxygen enrichment in the iron & steel industry has gained more maturity, and the oxygen production capacity per hour has expanded from thousands of cubic meters to tens of thousands of cubic meters. According to the performance statistics of PKU Pioneer, we've won the bids for a total of 16 VPSA oxygen generation projects above 10,000Nm3/h since 2019, among which the maximum oxygen capacity for blast furnace oxygen enrichment reaches 55,000Nm3/h. Even in the complex environment where industrial development is hindered, China's iron & steel industry is bucking the trend. Thanks to the strong market demand, iron & steel enterprises have sufficient power to expand their production and the active iron & steel market has strongly contributed to the intelligent, large-scale, and refined development of VPSA oxygen generation technology. For more than 10 years, the VPSA oxygen production process has been widely used and fully verified in private iron & steel enterprises that it can create efficient and sustainable economic benefits for those enterprises. Also, in the past two years, a number of large state-owned steel enterprises put VPSA oxygen units into operation and significant profits were generated, indicating that the VPSA oxygen generation technology has been admitted to the large-volume oxygen supply market in the iron & steel industry, and whether private or state-owned steel enterprises, will have more options in the choice of oxygen production process above10,000Nm3/h.