Activation Of Carbon And Ethane Hydrate Formation In Carbon Pores

High specific surface area activated carbon material is an excellent adsorbent,which has a unique pore structure and surface active functional groups, chemicalstability, high mechanical strength, and be widely used in environmental protection,chemical and other fields. With KOH as an activating agent to preparate activatedcarbon is a major chemical activation method, taking into account the cost ofindustrial production, NaOH is used to instead of KOH as an activator in thisexperiment and coconut shell charcoal is used as the carbon source to preparateactivated carbon material. The experimental results show that two kinds of highspecific surface area activated carbon can be obtained by using NaOH as activator,whith pore size uniform in the range of1.5nm and1.2to3.0nm and specific surfacearea are2583m2/g and2860m2/g respectively. In addition, activated carbonpreparated by this method, whose largest surface area can reach2989m2/g, however,which has a wide range of pore size distribution and poor uniformity of the pore size.The homogeneity of pore size distribution of activated carbon sample prepared byNaOH is relatively poor compared with activated carbon sample prepared by KOH.Formation of hydrates in carbon pores was utilized to store natural gas, and ethaneis the second major component of natural gas; therefore, ethane hydrate formation incarbon pores is studied in comparison with that of methane. Ethane is a major rawmaterial of ethylene in petrochemical industry, therefore, its mixture with ethylene isof importance and the formation condition of ethane hydrates was compared also withthat of ethylene. The equilibrium isotherms of ethane on wet carbons with differentwater contents as well as the isotherms for different temperatures were collected, fromwhich the formation pressures of ethane hydrates as well as the enthalpy change ofethane hydrate formation were determined. It was shown that the largest volumetricstorage capacity for ethane is observed at the water load that just about fully fills porespaces. Ethane hydrates were formed in wet activated carbons at about same pressuresas in water media and the formation pressure is much lower than that needed formethane hydrates formation.