The ongoing energy and environmental crises have pushed the transportation sector, a major greenhouse gas emitter, to seek sustainable fuel and technology alternatives. Natural gas and bio-methane are potential alternatives with numerous advantages over conventional fuels. Adsorbed natural gas (ANG) technology uses porous adsorbent material to store methane efficiently at lower pressures. An issue limiting this technology is the lack of compact tanks with efficient adsorbent packing that increase storage capacity. This study addresses the need for more compact ANG tanks by creating novel binder-less monolithic activated carbon monolith adsorbents with targeted porosity. A template is produced using 3D printing and a commercially available phenolic resin as a filling material. Upon thermal treatment, the 3D-printed template combusts with molecular oxygen in its structure, and the resin is transformed into activated carbon by pyrolysis. Longer activation times led to higher BET surface areas. However, after activation periods beyond 15 minutes, the surface area increase is obtained at the expense of a higher burn-off, which affects the material density.
Adsorption of 0.04g/g of methane was measured at 30 bar and 298 K on the activated carbon monolith with the highest BET surface area (516 m2/g). Results in the same conditions on a super high surface area Maxsorb activated carbon were 0.13g/g. Although the methane capacity obtained is lower than in a commercial sample, it was demonstrated that producing an activated carbon monolith with tailored porosity is possible. New techniques for activation should be studied to enhance their gravimetric capacity to make ANG competitive.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/692623 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Abubakar, Abubakar Juma Abdallah |
| Contributors | Grande, Carlos A., Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division, Pinnau, Ingo, Ruiz-Martinez, Javier, Nunes, Suzana Pereira |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | 2024-06-15, At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis will become available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2024-06-15. |
| Relation | N/A |
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