Structured packing is widely used in air separation equipment such as upper column, crude argon column, refined argon column, etc., so that the energy consumption of air separation equipment, the extraction rate of oxygen and argon, equipment start-up time, and changing conditions have been significantly improved. . Structured packed columns generally have six characteristics: 1. The pressure drop of ceramic structured packing is significantly lower. Since the gas-liquid-liquid two-phase contact of structured packing is membrane contact, different from the bubbling contact of the two phases in the sieve tray column, the pressure drop of the packed column is only between 1/4 and 1/6 of the sieve tray column. For example, a column on ceramic structured packing has an operating resistance of 3.5 to 4.2 kPa and an operating pressure of only 35 to 45 kPa at the bottom. The sieve tower is usually still used in the lower tower, and the operating resistance remains unchanged. Therefore, the working pressure of the lower tower drops by 0.05 times. 0.06MPa, generally 0.44~0.48MPa, so that the shaft power of the air compressor can be reduced by 5%~7%. 2. Regular packing and separation efficiency is high. The lower the operating pressure of the tower is, it is very helpful for the separation of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, especially the separation of oxygen and argon, the general oxygen extraction rate can be increased by 1% to 3%, and the argon gas extraction rate can be improved 5% to 10%. Practice has proved that the oxygen extraction rate of the air separation plant is over 99%, and the extraction rate of argon is over 80%. According to the actual measurement, the oxygen content of nitrogen pollution in the upper tower can be lower than 0.1%, or even 150-200×10-4%, indicating that the upper tower has reached a state of complete rectification. Due to the high oxygen extraction rate and low processing air volume, the energy consumption of the air separation plant drops to 0.4-0.45 kWh/m3O2.3, and the ceramic structured packing accommodates less liquid. The capacity of a structured packed column is usually only 1% to 6% of the column volume, while the capacity of a sieve tray column is 8% to 10% of the column volume. The low liquid retention rate means that the liquid retention time in the column is short, and the operating pressure drop is small, which is beneficial to changing the operating conditions. Structured packed tower designs can range from 40% to 120%. 4. Regular packing gaps. The porosity of the ceramic structured packing is greater than 95%. In the sieve plate column, the area of u200bu200bthe orifice plate accounts for 80% of the cross-sectional area of u200bu200bthe column body, and the open porosity is 8% to 12%, which is much smaller than the porosity of the packing layer. Packed columns are smaller than sieve columns for the same load; in general, their cross-sectional area is only about 70% of that of sieve tray columns. This is because, for large air separation plants, the reduction in towers facilitates transportation. 5. Equipment startup time is greatly shortened. After adopting structured packing on the tower, the amount of liquid during normal rectification is greatly reduced, which greatly shortens the start-up time of the air separation plant. The typical start-up time is only 26 to 30 hours. 6. The oxygen content in the argon fraction is about 90%. Using low-temperature rectification directly reduces to 1~2×10-4%, the theoretical column number of the distillation column needs to be about 180, the sieve plate needs about 300 pieces, and the resistance can reach about 100kPa. Obviously, crude argon cannot be discharged out of the column, but structured packing About 45 meters high. The resistance is only 14 to 16kPa, so a fully rectified argon process can be achieved.