There are seven noble gases that form their own group in the periodic table. They are colorless, tasteless and odorless, non-flammable and hardly soluble in water. Their outermost electron shell is fully occupied, so that they have high stability and low reactivity, because „noble“ in this context actually means „non-reactive“.
The noble gases krypton and xenon are extremely rare. Krypton only makes up 0.000114 % of the earth’s atmosphere, which means that 900,000 m3 of air must be broken down to produce 1 m3 of krypton. Xenon is 14 times rarer still. These gases are correspondingly expensive and the market price (depending on the size of the cylinder) is around one million dollars per filled cylinder. In addition to their function as shielding gases for welding, the electronics and aerospace industries are particularly reliant on high-purity noble gases.
At the beginning of the year, Linde opened one of the world’s largest plants for the production and filling of krypton and xenon in Leuna. The raw product comes from air separation plants, which separate the ambient air into its main components nitrogen and oxygen. Krypton and xenon accumulate in the liquid oxygen and are separated in distillation columns. After the so-called purification in the cold box, the now high-purity gas is filled into bottles. In Leuna, the pure gases produced are filled directly into various pressurized gas cylinder containers for transport. Compressors are required for this.
sera compressors stand for high quality and absolute purity, as they are hermetically sealed so that no gas can escape during operation. This is of immense importance for applications where even a small leak can lead to high financial losses. Thanks to many years of experience with comparable projects, it was possible to design the overall construction in such a way that three different functions of the overall system can be covered simultaneously through standardisation. This also resulted in lower design costs, savings in procurement and rationalised production and assembly lines.
