Chemical Engineering Journal
Chemical Engineering Journal
5 years ago

Efficient adsorptive separation of C3H6 over C3H8 on flexible and thermoresponsive CPL-1

Efficient adsorptive separation of C3H6 over C3H8 on flexible and thermoresponsive CPL-1
The separation of olefin/paraffin mixtures is of great importance for the petrochemical industry, mainly achieved by using energy-intensive cryogenic distillation. We herein reported a flexible pillared-layer framework CPL-1 possessing a thermoresponsive gate opening behavior for C3H6 adsorption. We measured the C3H6 and C3H8 adsorption and desorption isotherms of CPL-1 at six different temperatures (273, 278, 283, 288, 293 and 298K), respectively. Results showed that the gate opening pressure of C3H6 adsorption for CPL-1 increased with an increase of the adsorption temperature from 273K to 288K. However, no gate opening effect was observed within the measured pressure (<100kPa) as the temperature increased to 293 and 298K. In contrast, C3H8 adsorption for CPL-1 only occurred surface adsorption without appreciable amount adsorbed due to the closed phase of pores under all measured conditions. Thus, we investigated the adsorptive separation of C3H6 over C3H8 for CPL-1 at 273K and developed the regeneration process at room temperature (298K), based on its unique thermoresponsive property. Breakthrough experiments demonstrated the superior C3H6/C3H8 separation performance of CPL-1. Static and dynamic regeneration experiments showed that CPL-1 had excellent stability and high desorption efficiency after five consecutive adsorption-desorption cycles. Particularly, CPL-1 can be easily regenerated at 298K since the desorption activation energy of C3H6 on CPL-1 was only 22.81kJ/mol. Furthermore, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation revealed that the hydrogen bonding was a key factor governing the selective adsorption of C3H6 over C3H8 in CPL-1. This investigation highlighted the central importance of flexibility of adsorbent, and suggested that CPL-1 could be an interesting material for C3H6/C3H8 separation and had excellent regeneration property.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S1385894717311919

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.