Coupling effect of temperature, column height, properties of adsorbent and VOCs during dynamic adsorption

Dynamic adsorption is important for evaluating the Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) adsorption performance. During adsorption process, the exothermal characteristic could lead to an increase of the column temperature, which might cause bed combustion and is negative to the adsorption efficiency. In present study, we chose graphene oxide(GO) as adsorbent, comparing with hypercrosslinked polymeric adsorbent(HPA), and conducted the dynamic adsorption experiment of ethanol, n-hexane and cyclohexane at 308 K, 318 and 328 K with different adsorbent column height. The results showed that the temperature had linear and negative influence on breakthrough capacity for three VOCs on two adsorbents. And the breakthrough adsorption capacity of ethanol, n-hexane and cyclohexane on two adsorbents were as follows: ethanol > cyclohexane > n-hexane, closely related with physical parameters of VOCs. But the physical properties of ethanol, n-hexane and cyclohexane have little influence on dynamic adsorption rate in this paper. In addition, for n-hexane and cyclohexane, the breakthrough adsorption capacity on HPA were higher than that on GO, but their k values were similarity on HPA and GO. While for ethanol, the breakthrough capacity and k value on GO were higher than HPA. Most important of all, the negative effect of temperature on VOCs adsorption on GO was lower than HPA. Therefore, GO is a good alternative adsorbent for VOCs recovery. Furthermore, with higher column height, the dynamic adsorption capacity was higher but the adsorption rate was lower. While the influence of temperature on dynamic adsorption capacity and rate were relative independent with column height of adsorbent.