Multicomponent adsorption measurements on activated carbon, zeolite molecular sieve and metal-organic framework

Sorptive gas treatment for biogas purification, mainly in pressure swing adsorption processes, currently constitutes the state of the art. Consequently the knowledge of sorption properties of appropriate sorbent materials is of great importance. In this context pure gas isotherms are often used for the evaluation of such materials. To allow a realistic description of sorptive biogas purification processes the multicomponent sorption behavior of corresponding materials is of special interest. For this reason we present measurement data for the selective sorption of quaternary gas mixtures on activated carbon Norit R1 Extra, zeolite molecular sieves 13X and metal-organic framework Basolite C300 with a gas mixture consisting of 60 mol% CH4, 33 mol% CO2, 5 mol% N-2 and 2 mol% H-2. Measurements were performed with a manometric-gravimetric sorption measurement apparatus, combined with a gas chromatography system. In contrast to the aforementioned multicomponent sorption measurement, measured pure gas sorption data are often used for multicomponent sorption prediction. For this purpose, several prediction models, i.e. the IAST model, are available. In this context, the multicomponent sorption behavior of the materials mentioned above was also predicted using the IAST model. The results of the performed sorption measurements and the comparison to the predicted sorption data will be presented and discussed in this paper.