| Summary: | In the recent years, the level of carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere has been on the rise and this has caused global warming to be a concern in the future. The increase in demand for fossil fuels has caused many to use other alternatives of energy sources such as natural gases (NG). These global issues have led to researchers to start discovering different methods to adsorb methane and carbon dioxide. One of the methods is to use metal organic frameworks (MOF). Storing of Liquefied Natural Gases (LNG) and Compressed Natural Gases (CNG) have their individual limitations and dangerous hazards, hence making Adsorbed Natural Gases (ANG) the ideal for methane storage.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has fixed CH4 storage targets for adsorbents at 350 cm3 CH4 (STP) per cm3 adsorbent and 0.5 g CH4 per g adsorbent at ambient conditions [1]. Hence, there is a need to synthesize the right MOF to meet the required standard. In this study, four MOF samples namely MIL-101(Cr), 1% K MIL-101, SiO2/MIL-101 composite and Maxsorb/MIL-101 composite were chosen to be analyzed. The microstructures of the samples were been examined using BET, SEM and XRD to analyze the modified MIL-101 structures. Subsequently, experiments were been conducted to measure the methane uptake for each sample at temperatures ranging from 125K to 300K and pressures up to 10 bar using the volumetric and cryogenic set-up. Based on the results that were been obtained, it can be deduced that at low pressures, lower temperatures gave a higher uptake. However, none of the samples were able to meet the DOE targets at ambient conditions.
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