Chemie Ingenieur Technik, Vol.89, No.12, 1679-1685, 2017
Characterization of Porous Silica Materials withWater at Ambient Conditions. Calculating the Pore Size Distribution from the Excess Surface Work Disjoining Pressure Model
Characterization of mesoporous materials today is routinely performed recording the adsorption isotherm of nitrogen at 77K. The pore size distribution (PSD) can subsequently be determined using either thermodynamics or statistical mechanics based approaches. While nitrogen has evolved as the reference adsorptive, other gases are often used to extract more information from the isotherm. This contribution is focused on the calculation of a PSD from the water vapor isotherm. It is demonstrated that water adsorption provides accurate results comparable to the standard nitrogen adsorption.
Keywords:Density functional theory;Excess surface work;MCM-41;Pore size distribution;Water adsorption