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Beginner's Guide For Selecting Adsorbent For Your Industry
An adsorbent is a chemical substance that adsorbs moisture and holds it like a magnet on its surface. Every adsorbent works specifically and addresses the needs of a particular industry. Following is the list of adsorbents for your industry:
Silica Gel
Silica gel is one of most commonly used adsorbent that consists of nano-porous Silicon Dioxide (SiO2). Silica gel comes in the form of glass beads and its nano-porous structure provides large surface area available for the adsorption and hold moisture up to 40% of its own weight.
Silica Gel is a highly activated adsorbent, furnished in a wide range of mesh sizes to suit various industrial applications. It is non-corrosive, non-flammable, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and chemically inert. It comes in two variants:
- Indicating silica gel which visually signals when desiccant needs to be recharged or replaced as it changes color when it becomes saturated with moisture.
- Non-Indicating silica gel, it means that when the silica gel adsorbs moisture, it will continue to be white. This kind of gel you find in the small packets when you buy some products.
Silica Gel is a good adsorbent for HCl, gasoline-range hydrocarbons, CO2, C12, Sulphur and nitrogen compounds, aromatics, and many others. Silica Gel is widely used in industries where a high capacity desiccant or selective adsorbent is required.
Molecular sieves are synthetic zeolite materials engineered with pores of precise and uniform structure and size. This allows them to preferentially adsorb gases and liquids based on molecular size and polarity. There are four main types of molecular sieves: 3A, 4A, 5A, and 13X.
A molecular sieve works by adsorbing gas or liquid molecules that are smaller than the effective diameter of its pores, while excluding those molecules that are larger than the openings. Molecular sieve is commonly used in the separation of ethanol and water.
Activated alumina is a porous, solid form of aluminum oxide. As a desiccant, activated alumina can be used to dry compressed air and other gas and liquid streams. It is used to purify gas streams by the selective adsorption of specific molecules. Activated alumina also has water filtration and catalyst applications. It is commonly used in the desulfurizing process for natural gas. Filters with activated alumina can be reused over and over again as it can be regenerated by heating it to any temperature between 350° & 600°F (177° to 316°C)
