Experimental and modeling investigation of adsorption equilibrium of CH4, CO2, and N2 on activated carbon and prediction of multi-component adsorption equilibrium

Abstract

In this study, the equilibrium adsorption isotherms of N2, CH4 and CO2 on two types of activated carbon adsorbents were measured. The experimental data of the equilibrium adsorption were fitted to the Sips isotherm model at different temperatures. It was found that the Sips model is appropriate to predict the behavior of gas adsorption. Moreover, a method based on the Gibbs energy of desorption of the solid adsorbent was used to estimate the amount of separation factor of binary mixtures at different temperatures. Also, the amount of gas adsorption on activated carbon was predicted by using the artificial neural network-genetic algorithm (ANN-GA) model. The results of the ANN-GA model indicated that the performance of the model for predicting the behavior of gas adsorption is acceptable. Finally, the extended Sips model was used to simulate the multi-component adsorption of three binary mixtures CO2/N2, CH4/N2 and CO2/CH4, and the results of this model were validated by experimental data.