Domestic air separation equipment manufacturing industry is a new industry established and developed after the founding of new China. The 60 years development of air separation plant has experienced four stages: imitation, technology introduction, independent research and development and rapid development.

Stage 1: from 1950s to 1970s, China's air separation equipment manufacturing industry started from imitation and self-reliance, and gradually established the air separation equipment manufacturing system. In 1953, Harbin machinery works successfully trial produced two sets of 30nm3 / h (oxygen) high-pressure process air separation equipment, which ended the history of manufacturing non air separation equipment in China. At present, China's air separation plant manufacturing industry has gone through the following stages: the switching process of imitation stone regenerator, aluminum strip regenerator, plate fin heat exchanger, etc. The main product grades are 1000, 3350 and 6000nm3 / h air separation units. However, the equipment at that time had many shortcomings, such as difficult to meet the production and purity standards, high energy consumption, poor reliability and so on.

Stage 2: from the late 1970s to the 1980s, through the introduction of European large-scale air separation plant design and manufacturing technology, the design and manufacturing level of China's large and medium-sized air separation plants was rapidly improved, and the air separation process was promoted to molecular sieve adsorption full low-pressure process. During this period, the grade of air separation plant is mainly 6000 and 10000 Nm3 / h, and most users are metallurgical enterprises. In 1985, the turbo expander designed and manufactured in China was applied to a set of 1200 Nm3 / h (nitrogen) liquefaction equipment, which accumulated preliminary experience for the wide application of booster turbo expander in air separation plant.

Stage 3: in the 1990s, on the basis of introducing, digesting and absorbing foreign technologies, China's air separation equipment manufacturing industry independently developed a new generation of high expansion rate booster turbo expander, room temperature molecular sieve purification, structured packing distillation column technology, and full distillation (hydrogen free) argon production process. Domestic enterprises have broken through the difficulties of process organization, process calculation and distillation calculation in the design technology of air separation plant, and mastered all the technical essentials of design and manufacture of air separation equipment. With independent intellectual property rights, the production, purity, oxygen extraction rate, unit oxygen energy consumption and other technical parameters of domestic air separation equipment have reached the world-class level, and the specification of domestic air separation products has increased from 10000 Nm3 / h to 15000 Nm3 / h. during this period, Linde and other well-known enterprises were optimistic about China's large-scale air separation equipment market, and successively introduced 20000, 30000 and 60000 Nm3 / h large-scale air separation equipment.

Stage 4: after 2000, China's air separation equipment industry has developed rapidly, and a large number of national air separation equipment manufacturers have kept up with the pace of world air separation technology development. Through independent innovation and independent research and development, large-scale air separation equipment with different internal compression processes suitable for metallurgy, petrochemical and new coal chemical industry has been developed. The specification of the equipment increased rapidly from 20000 Nm3 / h to 80000-120000 Nm3 / h, meeting the needs of national economic development. After decades of development, the air separation industry has reached the forefront stage, and the technical performance index of domestic air separation has approached or even reached the foreign level.