Ammonia Absorption Enhancement by Metal Halide Impregnated Hollow Mesoporous Silica Spheres

Abstract Ammonia is one of hazardous pollutants that can endanger human life. It must be controlled with sorbent material that can target ammonia with high selectivity. Hollow mesoporous silica spheres (HMSS) are conventionally used as a carrier of catalyst. But ammonia can be absorbed selectively via impregnation of metal halide, such as MgCl 2 . In this work, the porous matrix HMSS is synthesized via one step preparation, and the absorption sites are adopted by impregnation method. The influence of loading content is taking into consideration on absorption performance. The structure of prepared material is analysed using FTIR, XRD, BET, TEM tools. The absorption capacity is performed in a fixed bed column and characterized by dynamic breakthrough. The results show that the composite material MgCl 2 /HMSS can absorb 20 mol/kg ammonia at 30 °C and 0.8 atm which is competitive than commercial sorbents. Meanwhile, 80 wt% of loading content is reported the highest ammonia capacity for the same type of sorbent. The experimental data can be reproducible for many times.