Measurement of pore diffusion factor of porous solid materials

Abstract

Internal diffusion of molecules in porous materials plays an important role in many chemical processes. However, the pore diffusion capacity of porous materials cannot be measured by conventional catalyst characterization methods. In the present paper, a pore diffusion factor, the ratio of the diffusion-constriction factor to the pore tortuosity of the porous materials, was proposed to measure the diffusion ability of pores inside solid materials, and a method was proposed for measuring the diffusion factor using a well-defined and uniform pore size material as a reference. The diffusion factor was calculated based on the effective diffusion coefficients and the diffusion-constriction factor and pore tortuosity of the reference porous materials. The pore diffusion factor measurement can be performed at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. The pore diffusion factor of conventional porous materials was found to be much smaller than 1, indicating that there is a lot of room for improving the diffusion ability of the conventional catalysts and adsorbents, and could be significantly increased through adding small number of fibers into the conventional porous materials as template.