Assessment of the density of (meso)porous materials from standard volumetric physisorption data

•Determination of apparent density by standard physisorption device.•Determination of apparent densities of ordered mesoporous silica, carbon and metal oxides.•Apparent densities of various mesoporous materials differ from reference values by up to 40%.

Characterization and application of (meso)porous materials often require information about the density of the respective samples. For example, the BET surface area is, by definition, normalized to the sample mass; hence, any comparison between samples of different composition needs to take into account their respective densities. Literature data on the densities of porous materials are scarce. Frequently, only bulk-phase densities are available which sometimes differ from those of porous samples, especially for amorphous systems, such as silica or carbon. The apparent density, i.e. the density of the sample excluding the gas-accessible pore volume, is typically determined by helium gas pycnometry utilizing specialized pycnometers. We demonstrate how to obtain the same data from standard N2 physisorption measurements as part of the regular measurement routine. We evaluate the method by reference measurements utilizing a non-porous reference sample (glass rod) to confirm the validity of the method. Then we present results on apparent density measurements of several mesoporous silica materials (MCM-41, MCM-48, SBA-15, KIT-6), mesoporous carbon (CMK-3, -5, -8, -9), and a variety of mesoporous metal oxides obtained by nanocasting.

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