Experimental Methods of Adsorbed Natural Gas Storage

Physical adsorption of methane above the critical point and the adsorption equilibria of the mixture of natural gas on microporous sorbents is of great practical importance for vehicular natural gas storage technology. One of the difficulties in this area has to develop a simple model for the adsorption isotherms, which must have a clear physical interpretation in terms of thermodynamic properties of the gas-solid system. The success in this area has been limited. The results obtained from molecular simulation are often dissatisfactory because the simulation model is usually oversimplification of the structure of the adsorbents and ignores several important effects such as energetic heterogeneity of the surface, distribution of pore sizes, and so on. So experiments are still indispensable. An overview of classical and new methods to measure multicomponent gas adsorption equilibria tightly related to the vehicular natural gas storage is given.