Determination of absolute adsorption in highly ordered porous media

Recently developed Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are the materials with the highest intrinsic surface areas to date and their discovery increased the research activity in the field of microporous adsorption materials significantly. In this contribution, a generic method of analysis for volumetrically measured adsorption isotherms is presented that separates absolute adsorption from excess adsorption to the best possible degree by representing the absolute adsorption isotherm by a superposition of in respect to pressure strictly monotonously increasing fitting function. The procedure allows to determine the heat of adsorption at constant gas uptake via implicitly defined quantities. The method was applied to adsorption data of hydrogen on MOF-5 ranging from 40 K to 200 K. Methane adsorption on MOF-5 was used to demonstrate that the common practice of neglecting the difference between excess and absolute adsorption leads to erroneously increased heat of adsorption values at high coverages and temperatures. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.