Adsorption and separation of propane and propylene by Cuban natural volcanic glass

Separation of Light Liquid Paraffin C5–C9 with Cuban Volcanic Glass Previously Used in Copper Elimination from Water Solutions

“…As indicated previously [20], the FTIR spectrum of volcanic glass displays a broad signal between 3000 and 3700 cm −1 , which corresponds to -OH groups. Thus, the band located at 3620 cm −1 is assigned to structural OH-stretching, and those at 3420 cm −1 and 1640 cm −1 correspond to OH stretching and bending vibrational bands of adsorbed water [42].…”

“…The contribution of each -CH 2 -of the n-paraffins can be determined from the slope of the representation (adsorption heat vs. type of n-paraffin) (Figure 7), obtaining a Q dif of 5.3 kJ/mol for raw volcanic glass, while Cu-volcanic glass only reaches a Q dif of 4.2 kJ/mol (Table 4). In this way, previous research separated propane-propylene by inverse gas chromatography, indicating that propylene, which displays a stronger adsorbent-adsorbate interaction by the presence of the double bond, exhibits lower Q dif in comparison to propane [20]. In this sense, the incorporation of Cu species into volcanic glass also causes a stronger interaction with n-paraffins, which could be related to a decrease of its Q dif value.…”

“…Considering the low specific surface area and the macroporosity, the N2 adsorbed must be attributed to the fillings between adjacent particles. According to the data of raw volcanic glass reported previously [20], XRD of volcanic glass hardly displays defined diffraction peaks. A broad band can be observed at 2θ = 20-30º which is attributed to the amorphous structure of volcanic glass.…”

“…Its high availability, low cost, capacity to operate at low temperatures, and stability make this material a potential and attractive candidate to be used in both heavy metal removal and paraffin separation for The adsorption heat of raw volcanic glass and Cu-volcanic glass was compared with other data reported in the literature using inverse gas chromatography under similar reaction conditions. Thus, the adsorption heat of both samples is in the same range as MOFs such as Cu-BTC [10] and natural zeolites such as clinoptilolite [7], so the use of inverse gas chromatography with inexpensive materials such as volcanic glass is a sustainable alternative to the traditional distillation to separate olefins/paraffins or several n-paraffins with different alkyl chains [20].…”

Light N-Paraffins Separation by Inverse Gas Chromatography With Cuban Volcanic Glass

“…The physicochemical properties of these materials depend on the chemical composition of magma and its cooling rate (Friedman and Long, 1984). Volcanic glass has been used as starting material for the synthesis of zeolites (Yoshida and Inoue, 1986;Yoshida and Inoue, 1988) or smectites (Tomita et al, 1993), the adsorption of radioactive ions (Steinhauser and Bichler, 2008), arsenic (Ruggieri et al, 2008) or copper (Alkan and Dogan, 2001), the adsorption of dyes such as methylene blue (Dogan et al, 2004) methyl violet , victoria blue , the synthesis of composites with polyacrylamide (Tekin et al, 2010) and more recently in the separation of propane/propylene (Fernández-Hechevarría et al, 2015).…”