A Grand Canonical Monte-Carlo Study of Argon Adsorption/Condensation in Mesoporous Silica Glasses: Application to the Characterization of Porous Materials

Abstract

AbstractWe have studied adsorption of argon in a mesoporous silica Controlled Porous Glass (CPG) means of Grand Canonical Monte-Carlo (GCMC) simulation. A numerical sample of the CPG adsorbent has been obtained by using an off-lattice reconstruction method recently introduced to reproduce topological and morphological properties of correlated disordered porous materials. The off-lattice functional of (100 m2/g)-Vycor is applied to a simulation box containing silicon and oxygen atoms of cubic cristoballite with an homothetic reduction of factor 2.5 so to obtain 30Å-CPG sample. A realistic surface chemistry is then obtained by saturating all oxygen dangling bonds with hydrogen. The Ar, Kr and Xe adsorption/desorption isotherms are calculated at different temperatures. At sufficiently low temperature, they exhibit a capillary condensation transition with a finite slope by contrast to that theoretically predicted for simple pore geometriessuch as slits and cylinders. In the low pressure and temperature domain, we have identified different adsorption scenarios, which can be interpreted on the basis of a Zisman-type of criterium for wetting. We demonstrate that the BET surface area is strongly related to this criterion. At higher pressure, we demonstrate that the pore size distribution obtained by using the standard BJH analysis applied to both adsorption and desorption data qualitatively reproduces the main features of the chord length distribution.