Smart Materials & Structures

Microporous and mesoporous carbons are excellent materials for any energy applications. As capacitors, they exhibit high power, a large life cycle, high reliability, and low cost. Coconut shell carbons dominate this market because of their low cost. The large surface areas of these carbons also make them useful in many adsorption and catalytic systems. Th e pore structure of these carbons allows special selective processes to be carried out such as separation of O2/N2, CO2/H2O, Butene/Isobutene and many other processes. The detailed parameters of each process play an important role in the selectivity and effectiveness of the process.

 

In the work presented, some of the most important parameters are discussed for microporous and saran fibers at temperatures from 200^oC to 1000^oC. These materials exhibited adsorption characteristics of 4A angstrom and 5A angstrom molecular sieves. Activated diff usion is shown to be the dominant factor for exclusion of specifi c molecules. Th e dynamic size and shape of the molecules determines the observed amount of adsorption at a specifi c time and temperature. It can be concluded that when the molecular dimensions are close to the sizer and shape of the pores, the most important factors that determine the observed adsorption are time, temperature, relative pressure, and the diff usion path length.