Automated monitoring of the establishment of the adsorption equilibrium: Adsorption of polyethylene from 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene onto a zeolite at temperature 140 °c

Abstract

The automated procedure for the monitoring of the adsorption process in the solute-sorbent-solvent system has been elaborated. It uses commercially available instrument CRYSTAF model 200. The application of CRYSTAF enabled monitoring of adsorption of linear polyethylene with weight average molar masses of 2, 14, and 53kg/mol from 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene onto zeolite SH-300 at temperature as high as 140 °C. It is the authors' understanding that this is the first demonstration of an adsorption isotherms for polyethylene. The measurement with the CRYSTAF instrument reduces manual manipulations with dangerous solvents at high temperature and enables automated long-time monitoring of the concentration of the solute in an adsorption system. Copyright © 2009 Tibor Macko et al.