Date of Award

2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Chemical Engineering

Department

Washkewicz College of Engineering

First Advisor

Orhan, Talu

Subject Headings

Chemical Engineering

Abstract

Chemical products are made by combination of processes that includes synthesis, separation and purification. Separation processes comprises a large portion in these industries and are considered to be critical as most of the applications in chemical industries involves mixtures. Traditional separation methods such as distillation, evaporation, drying etc., requires high energy. For example, air separation to produce nitrogen and oxygen was previously practiced by cryogenic distillation that involves high pressure units and large energy requirement. On other hand, adsorption processes utilize less energy resources and is unique among separation methods. The phase separation is achieved by the existence of a solid. Uniqueness of adsorption is the higher selectivity achievable by tailoring the adsorbents. Design and optimization of adsorption processes requires equilibrium information as models proofed by experimental data for understanding the conditions occurring in the process. This study is aimed at measuring, analyzing and reporting equilibrium data for pure component and binary mixture of N2 and O2 in LiLSX material. In addition, a model, Dual-Site Langmuir, is tested for its ability to represent the data in relevant range. Volumetric measurement technique is one of the most commonly used method for measuring pure and binary adsorption which involves measuring pressure change in a known volume of gas. In this study, pure adsorption equilibria for N2 and O2 in LiLSX was measured at three temperatures (277.15K, 296.15K, 318.15K). Isotherms in this study were of Type-1 represented by Dual-Site Langmuir model which constitutes the primary source of information necessary to model on adsorption process. Dual-Site Langmuir model is also used in this work to predict binary adsorption data. It should be noted that no adjustable parameters are available hence, DSL model is completely predictive using only pure component isotherm information. Binary adsorption equilibria for N2/O2 mixture in LiLSX at constant pressure(241.15kPa), constant temperature(296.15K) with varying compositions was measured experimentally to compare to predictions. These measurements are tedious and the accuracy of results is proportional to the complexity of measurements in these experiments. In the present work, DSL model reasonably represents pure component isotherm data very well and predicts binary data within experimental accuracy.

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