Adsorption and separation of xylene isomers vapors onto the chromium terephthalate-based porous material MIL-101(Cr): An experimental and computational study

Microporous and Mesoporous Materials, Volume 183, 1 January 2014, Pages 17–22
Adsorption and separation of xylene isomers vapors onto the chromium terephthalate-based porous material MIL-101(Cr): An experimental and computational study
Philippe Trens (a), Hichem Belarbi (a), Céline Shepherd (a), Philippe Gonzalez (a), Naseem A. Ramsahye (a), U-Hwang Lee (b), You-Kyong Seo (b), Jong-San Chang (b), (c)
a Institut Charles Gerhardt, UMR CNRS 5253, École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier, 8 rue de l’École Normale, 34296 Montpellier cedex 5, France
b Research Group for Nanocatalysts, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), Daejeon 305-600, South Korea
c Department of Chemistry, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon 440-176, South Korea
Abstract
Reports an investigation of the adsorption of the xylene mixture onto MIL-101(Cr). The adsorption isotherms of the xylene isomers exhibit a high affinity for each isomer with MIL-101(Cr), which agrees well with the enthalpies of adsorption extrapolated at zero coverage, −75 kJ mol⁻¹, −68 kJ mol⁻¹ and −64 kJ mol⁻¹ for o-, m- and p-xylene respectively.
The saturation plateau obtained with p-xylene is higher than that obtained with the adsorption of o- or m-xylene onto MIL-101(Cr). Authors discuss this in terms of stacking in the cavities of MIL-101(Cr). They observed the filling of the small cavities of MIL-101(Cr) to be more difficult in the case of m-xylene, which was interpreted by a weaker interaction with the cavities walls.
o-Xylene was successfully separated from the xylene mixture.
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