Principles of methane adsorption and natural gas storage
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Principles of methane adsorption and natural gas storage Yan Sun · Congmin Liu · Wei Su · Yaping Zhou · Li Zhou
Published online: 15 March 2009 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
Abstract The adsorption amount of methane on 16 different kinds of materials at 3.5 MPa and 298 K holds a linear relation with the specific surface area. The linear relationship implies that gases are adsorbed monolayerly on the surface of adsorbents at above-critical temperatures. Determination of surface area and calculation of storage capacity of a material are explicitly discussed. It is indicated that methane storage is different from natural gas storage and the difference affects the development of storage material. Natural gas is a mixture and all components other than methane cannot be desorbed when the tank pressure released to atmospheric at ambient temperature, therefore, a storage mechanism other than adsorption might be more suitable. Keywords Principle · Adsorption · Storage · Methane · Natural gas
technology of fuel cells are still far from commercialization. On the other hand, natural gas or other methane-based fuels are relatively practical alternative fuels. Utilization of alternative fuels will alleviate the pressure on environment and petroleum requirement. Therefore, following hydrogen storage, methane storage becomes a new motivation of developing novel materials such as MOF. However, different mechanism of gas storage calls for different kind of storage material, and a research conclusion may be misleading if the fundamental knowledge of adsorption and gas storage engineering are not correctly interpreted. Therefore, a systematic observation on methane adsorption is presented and a discussion on adsorption conceptions and fundamental rules in the calculation of gas storage capacity are presented.
2 Adsorption mechanism at above-critical temperatures 1 Introduction The world faces two big challenges. Excessive consumption of fossil fuels induces climate change, and approach of fossil fuel to depletion induces petroleum price shooting up. The best policy facing these challenges is to use hydrogen energy. Unfortunately, the production technology of renewable hydrogen, the technology of on-board storage, and the Y. Sun · W. Su · L. Zhou () High Pressure Adsorption Laboratory, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China e-mail: [email protected] C. Liu · Y. Zhou Department of Chemistry, School of Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
The adsorption mechanism of methane provides the basis of developing a storage material targeting at maximum storage capacity. A lesson might be learned from the experience with carbon nanotubes targeting at hydrogen storage. It was imagined that hydrogen fills in the tubes in a state of high density and, therefore, carbon nanotubes attracted world’s attention without paying attention to the fundamental physics law that fluids cannot condense at above-critical temperatures. However, more and more reliable measurements show
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