Specific Surface Area and Porosity Measurements of Aluminosilicate Adsorbents

Several natural low cost adsorbents such as activated carbon, flyash, clays etc have been tested for environmental applications. Adsorbent used here is the altered product of feldspar which has devitrified along with high quality silica, zeolitically transformed to tectosilicates of high surface area. Nitrogen sorption experiments are conducted before and after the loading of heavy metals. Nature of adsorption-desorption isotherms of the two samples proved the mesoporous nature of the sample. Surface area of the samples before and after the uptake of heavy metals was found out by fitting BET and Langmuir equations. Average pore diameters were calculated using the measured surface area and pore volume and is compared with that plotted using BJH cumulative pore volume.