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Product Briefing Outline: Air Products and Chemicals has introduced its new ‘XeCovery’ on-site xenon recovery service for the semiconductor and MEMS industries. Xenon has a number of unique properties that have attracted a variety of industries to use this atom, including semiconductor manufacturing. With demand and prices on the rise, there is a growing concern that cost will hamper its applicability. Air Products uses its patented Vacuum Swing Adsorption (VSA) technology as a means for recovering xenon from effluent gas streamS.

Problem: Over the past year the price for xenon has risen by more than 300%. Demand is anticipated to remain strong for the next few years, with little or no additional capacity expected online until 2010. Furthermore, because xenon is such a rare gas, there are a limited number of additional operating air separation plants of sufficient size to justify the economics for extracting xenon.

Solution: The XeCovery recovery service is based on an Air Products' patented technology utilizing Vacuum Swing Adsorption (VSA). Because it is an on-site service, the customer's investment is limited to costs associated with installation and utilities to operate the equipment. Air Products assumes responsibility for owning, operating, and maintaining the units placed at a site. The process is capable of extracting from parts-per-million to percent levels of xenon from effluent streams. An enriched mixture of recovered xenon (typically in the percent levels) is compressed and stored. Full vessels are then transported offsite for distillation and certification as research grade xenon.

Applications: On-site xenon recovery.

Platform: The system is scaleable to the volumes of xenon available for recovery, and can be customized to meet the variety of processes which may employ it as a process gas. As a service offering there is no obligation by the customer to own and operate the equipment.

Availability: July 2008 onwards.

Caption: This illustrates how a Xecovery system would be installed. Effluent gas from a process unit (e.g., a vacuum pump) is diverted towards the recovery system when xenon is present within the gas stream. This signal can either be from the customer (e.g., mass flow controller), or from an installed sensor. The extraction process can be designed so that either a single unit can be installed onto a process tool (i.e., for high xenon demand), or multiple tools can be interfaced into a single unit. This is especially attractive for processes that only periodically utilize xenon.