Adsorption Characterization in Porous Materials

Adsorption characterisation in porous materials encompasses the experimental and theoretical methods used to probe how fluids interact with and occupy void spaces at the micro-, meso- and macroscopic scales. Key objectives include determining pore size distributions, surface areas, connectivity and surface chemistry, as well as understanding mass transport phenomena such as diffusion and phase transitions within confined environments. Techniques range from physisorption isotherms and mercury or gas porosimetry to advanced imaging modalities and molecular simulations. Together they inform the design of catalysts, gas storage systems, separation membranes and environmental remediation technologies, ensuring that pore architecture and surface interactions are optimally matched to practical applications.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have harnessed atomistic simulations to unravel hysteresis and phase equilibria in porous frameworks with mixed pore sizes. These computational investigations have mapped grand canonical Monte Carlo and ensemble methods to reveal how interconnected micro- and mesopores influence stepwise adsorption and metastable states, offering molecular-level insights into adsorption loops and spinodal transitions. Experimental and theoretical work on ultra-small zeolitic cavities has demonstrated that capillary concepts remain valid at the subnanometre scale, uniting macroscopic capillarity with adsorption energies to explain fluid uptake across severe confinement. Moreover, new formalisms have translated detailed molecular dynamics into intermittent random-walk models that capture hierarchical diffusion in disordered media, enabling predictions of residence times and transport pathways from easily measurable parameters and thus bridging scales from molecular to mesoscopic transport phenomena.

Adsorption Characterization in Porous Materials publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in adsorption characterization in porous materials across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Adsorption isotherm: A curve relating the amount of gas or liquid adsorbed to pressure or concentration at constant temperature.

Hysteresis: The difference between adsorption and desorption branches in an isotherm, indicative of pore network effects.

Capillary condensation: The phenomenon whereby a fluid condenses in pores at pressures below the bulk saturation pressure due to curvature effects.

Porosimetry: Techniques such as gas sorption or mercury intrusion used to measure pore size distributions and pore volumes.

References

1. Mild-Temperature Supercritical Water Confined in Hydrophobic Metal–Organic Frameworks. Journal of the American Chemical Society (2024).
2. Integration of multi-scale porosimetry and multi-modal imaging in the study of structure-transport relationships in porous catalyst pellets. Chemical Engineering Journal (2023).
3. On the Low‐Pressure Hysteresis (LPH) in Gas Sorption Isotherms of Porous Carbons. Small (2024).
4. Computational investigation of hysteresis and phase equilibria of n-alkanes in a metal-organic framework with both micropores and mesopores. Communications Chemistry (2023).
5. Reminiscent capillarity in subnanopores. Nature Communications (2019).
6. Bridging scales in disordered porous media by mapping molecular dynamics onto intermittent Brownian motion. Nature Communications (2021).