On-Board Oxygen Generating System (OBOGS)

An On-Board Oxygen Generating System (OBOGS) offers significant advantages over the traditional stored-oxygen systems used today on most high-performance, high-altitude military aircraft and commercial airliners.

The on-board generation system is more reliable, safer and requires much less maintenance than a comparable stored-gas system. In addition, stored-gas systems have capacity limitations that simply do not exist with an OBOGS.

In an OBOGS application, an adsorbent is used to remove nitrogen from the air, which in turn enriches the oxygen concentration in the outlet air stream. Materials such as zeolite are commonly used to remove nitrogen and concentrate oxygen. Generally, these materials are produced as small crystallites, bound with clay to form small beads. But the properties of the clay binder reduce the effectiveness of the zeolite.

Honeywell has developed a new technique to bind crystallites using an organic polymer as a binder, rather than clay, to achieve a higher zeolite concentration. The use of this polymer provides an improvement in capacity, since more sites are available for nitrogen to absorb.

The Honeywell approach offers an even more compelling improvement opportunity by using an advanced ion exchange procedure to replace sodium ions with lithium ions. Lithium-enhanced zeolite promises to provide significantly enhanced performance and absorption capacity compared to zeolite with the customary sodium ion.