Improving sensitivity and accuracy of pore structural characterisation using scanning curves in integrated gas sorption and mercury porosimetry experiments

• Novel pore characterisation method (integrated gas sorption and mercury porosimetry).
• Highlights and overcomes limitations of conventional scanning curve experiments.
• Provides assessment of accuracy of conventional gas sorption PSDs.
• Possible ways of obtaining more accurate pore structure information.

Gas sorption scanning curves are increasingly used as a means to supplement the pore structural information implicit in boundary adsorption and desorption isotherms to obtain more detailed pore space descriptors for disordered solids. However, co-operative adsorption phenomena set fundamental limits to the level of information that conventional scanning curve experiments can deliver. In this work, we use the novel integrated gas sorption and mercury porosimetry technique to show that crossing scanning curves are obtained for some through ink-bottle pores within a disordered solid, thence demonstrating that their shielded pore bodies are undetectable using conventional scanning experiments. While gas sorption alone was not sensitive enough to detect these pore features, the integrated technique was, and, thence, this synergistic method is more powerful than the two individual techniques applied separately. The integrated method also showed how the appropriate filling mechanism equation (e.g. meniscus geometry for capillary condensation equations), to use to convert filling pressure to pore size, varied with position along the adsorption branch, thereby enabling avoidance of the further systematic error introduced into PSDs by assuming a single filling mechanism for disordered solids.

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