As a result of our current and on-going research efforts, we will be examining a variety of adsorption related areas in the future and welcome interested post-graduate and post-doctoral applicants to contact us for more information. The following are future potential research areas:
Mathematical methods in cyclic adsorption simulation and validation
Synthesis and evaluation of novel metallosilicate adsorbents
Development of intercalated graphitic structures for hydrogen storage
Pressure Swing adsorption relies on cycling the system pressure to produce separate a mixture of gases. The amount of adsorbent required to produce a given quantity of product is directly related to the frequency of the pressure swing – high frequency gives high throughput. Unfortunately, high frequency switching of valves as well as void losses leads to rapid mechanical failure and low recoveries. In this project, we want to explore new ways of rapidly changing system pressure without the need for mechanical switching of valves – examples might be piston based systems or acoustic wave processes. This is a highly innovative project in which both theory and practice must be developed from the ground up.
The use of adsorbents to separate gases is dependent on the rate at which the gas can enter and escape the adsorbent. The pore structure of the adsorbent pellet plays a dominant role in determining the rate of mass transfer and it is very important that this rate is quantified before large scale processes are developed. Thus, measurement of kinetics of adsorption is important in the overall adsorption engineering process. Unfortunately, current adsorbents are too “fast” for conventional kinetic tests to work and hence new tests must be developed. This project will develop new testing methodologies and equipment for characterising the rate of mass transfer in adsorbents and also develop modelling techniques to enable the data obtained from the new test unit to be used in process modelling simulators.
Adsorption processes such as pressure swing adsorption (PSA), vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) and temperature swing adsorption (TSA) are unsteady-state, non-linear, coupled, batch-like processes that are difficult to build and run. Since there are many design and process parameters which govern the operation of an adsorption process, designing an “optimal” process is time consuming and costly. For example, an experimental PSA system can have up to 15 variables which could be adjusted – each experiment can take a day to complete and hence several months (even years) may be needed to determine an “optimal” set of process conditions. As a results, mathematical models have been developed to simulate adsorption cycles with the hope that that these models will enable rapid determination of optimal designs. Unfortunately, these models often take as long to run as the experiment itself. This project will examine radical new approaches to adsorption simulation to enable order of magnitude reduction in computer time for adsorption simulation
New adsorption technology is driven by customer demand (new applications) as well as the development of new adsorbents which show greater selectivity than old adsorbents. One group of adsorbents – zeolites – are known to be excellent adsorbents and are used commercially to separate gases. In the drive to improve separation efficiency, there is a need to understand the fundamental reason for the selectivity of zeolites and thereby synthesize improved zeolitic adsorbents called more generally metallosilicates. This project will examine the synthesis and mechanisms behind the use of zeolites for gas separation. See a related project for more details.
Agricultural residues, especially rice husk, the by-product of the rice milling industry is produced in large quantities as a waste, creating environmental problems. Rice husk mainly consists of hemicellulose(HC), lignin(L), cellulose(C) and silica. Based on the molecular composition of rice husk, the silica and organic content can be advantageously exploited for the production of nanoporous carbon by using the silica as a natural template and a renewable silica source. The present project proposes to consider the rice husk waste as a resource base for production of technologically important materials like nanoporous carbon and silica rather than a problematic waste, by using environmentally friendly processing methodologies. The salient features of the proposal are the sequential depolymerisation with acidic gas and organic acids as pretreatment with increasing severity to sequentially remove alkali, hemicellulose, lignin and cellulose from rice husk. In turn these are precursors for derivatives of furan, phenol etc. The pretreatment will alter the rice husk C/Si ratio and composition, which will have a large influence on evolution of pore structure, surface area, pore volume etc. The second part of the study is the pyrolysis of rice husk and the pretreated husk to produce a carbon-silica composite in different activating conditions and removal of the silica component by selective leaching. The physico-chemical characteristics of the samples will be determined using spectroscopic and adsorption methods. The final part of the investigation is the study of gas storage(H2,CO2, CH4) and separation characteristics of the resultant materials.
PSA (pressure swing adsorption) is widely used to produce oxygen from air. Since air contains 1% argon, and argon and oxygen adsorb to the same degree on current adsorbents, it is not possible to separate the oxygen from the argon. As a result, O2 PSA processes can produce a maximum purity of 96% oxygen only (the remainder is argon). PSA is therefore limited to “low purity” applications such as combustion – if a way could be found to produce >99% oxygen, significant inroads into conventional distillation techniques can be made. In this project, it is proposed to combine aspects of equilibrium separations (conventional adsorbents) with kinetic separations (molecular sieve carbon - MSC) to produce a multi-layered system that can separate both nitrogen and argon from air.
Separation and purification of mixtures are process operations of great importance in the chemical and biological industries. Adsorbents play a major role in separation technologies due to their ability to selectively adsorb one or more components from a mixture. One particular feature of adsorbents of great importance is their internal porous structure. In this project, we will develop a new suite of nano-engineering techniques to create adsorbents with an ordered, well connected internal pore network at length scales from microscopic to macroscopic. This approach will lead to advanced materials with unprecedented separation performance significantly improving existing separations and offering new options for difficult separations.
The efficient storage of hydrogen for transport applications represents one of the largest hurdles in transitioning to the hydrogen economy. Current methods simply do not meet the required volumetric and gravimetric densities. Research into new materials to achieve these high storage densities is a very active area of study internationally with most major automobile and energy companies supporting their own in-house R&D efforts. The proposed study has the direct goal of achieving high volumetric and gravimetric storage densities of hydrogen through novel synthetic approaches to a newly recognized but, as yet, unrealized family of intercalated, pillared carbon structures.
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