Infrasorb: Optical detection of the heat of adsorption for high throughput adsorption screening of porous solids

The demand for fast screening methods in modern materials chemistry led to the development of a room temperature operated high-throughput tool for adsorption screening. Within five minutes a porosity screening of a large sample pool can be realized. Using a variety of different porous materials (activated carbons, porous polymers, metal–organic frameworks, zeolites) and the test gas n-butane, the reliability of the new instrument is shown. Furthermore, possible applications in the determination of n-butane capacities and BET surface areas are given as well as the application in synthesis or product control.The presented data exhibit high quality factors for the correlation of integrated signal intensity (heat of adsorption) and specific surface areas (above 0.97). As an example for the applicability of other gases that can be used with this tool, screening measurements using cyclohexane as test gas are also presented. The developed automated screening tool is an important step to overcome the bottle-neck between high-throughput syntheses technologies developed in the last decades and measurement of adsorption properties.

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► Determining the adsorption properties by infrared detection.
► Measurement of 12 samples in below 5 min with standard deviations ⩽5%.
► Evaluation of n-butane capacities with a correlation coefficient of 0.98.
► Calibration to BET surface areas (correlation coefficient of 0.97 at minimum).
► Usage as quality control instrument in zeolite synthesis.