Air separation equipment is a set of separation equipment, which uses deep freezing, pressure swing adsorption, membrane separation and other methods to liquefy and rectify the air, and finally separate oxygen, nitrogen, or extract helium, argon and other rare gases.

Air separation equipment manufacturing industry is to meet the needs of metallurgical, chemical and other industries for oxygen, nitrogen, argon and other industrial gases, and develops with the needs of the above industries for industrial gases. After the 1980s, China's air separation equipment manufacturing industry has made considerable progress through independent research and cooperative development on the basis of learning from foreign advanced technology. However, due to its late start, the technical level and scale of the industry are still low; After entering the 21st century, with the rapid growth of China's economy, metallurgical, petrochemical, electric power, coal chemical and other basic industries of national economy are developing rapidly, and the scale and large-scale are developing rapidly. As an important supporting equipment of industrial equipment in the above industries, the demand of air separation equipment is growing rapidly, and at the same time, it also presents a trend of rapid large-scale.

At present, China's air separation equipment industry mainly includes large-scale air separation equipment and small and medium-sized air separation equipment. There are great differences in technology, gas transmission capacity and application between the two kinds of equipment: large air separation equipment mainly adopts cryogenic separation technology, its production capacity generally exceeds 10000 m3 / h (up to 100000 m3 / h), large-scale air separation equipment covers a large area and large investment, Coal mines and large-scale chemical projects are usually used. Membrane separation and pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology are mainly used in small and medium-sized air separation plants. The gas transmission volume of small and medium-sized air separation plants is flexible (tens to hundreds of cubic meters / hour), with the advantages of small investment, mature technology and low energy consumption. Medical, aviation, electronics, food and small and medium-sized chemical projects are commonly used.