Adsorption of water vapour on silica gel

Abstract

In the world that we live in today, population has been increased rapidly and therefore, the consumption of various sources of energy also increased tremendously. The non-renewable sources of energy are limited and can only last us for a few more decades to a century. Thus, the demand for green, renewable and energy efficient technologies has increased in the recent years. The adsorption technology has the potential for most of the vapour compression based refrigeration or heat generation processes in the future and can be developed for adsorption cooling or heat pump devices. Therefore, researchers from all around the world have been working on this adsorption field intensely.

In this project, physisorption or physical adsorption of silica gel beads and water vapour is studied at various temperature by maintaining iso-pressure conditions. An experimental apparatus was fabricated, assembled and tested in this project. After assembling and testing, the volume calibration for all apparatus was carried out as it was important in order to keep other variables in the experiment constant. All the data related with the fabrication, assembly and testing are also presented later in the report in detail.

Adsorption characteristics of the silica gel are conducted at different pressures and temperatures. Then, the uptake data was calculated for each and every experiment using the ideal gas equation. After that, the validation of the experiment data with the standard adsorption isotherms are measured. The Langmuir isotherm is found to be the best isotherm to simulate the theoretical data.