A novel experimental setup for simultaneous adsorption and induced deformation measurements in microporous materials

A new experimental setup is presented allowing the simultaneous measurement of adsorption isotherms and adsorption-induced deformations. It is composed of a manometric technique coupled with a digital image correlation setup for full-field displacement measurements. The manometric part is validated by comparing adsorption isotherms with those obtained by a gravimetric method. The principles and methods of both adsorption isotherm and induced deformation measurements are presented in detail. As a first application of this new apparatus, the coupling between adsorption and induced deformation is characterised for a microporous media (activated carbon) saturated by pure CO2 (318.15 K, [0–60] bars) and pure CH4 (303.15 K, [0–130] bars). For this very homogeneous porous material, the induced deformation is characteristic of a pure volumetric swelling but the full-field setup may allow the characterisation of the localised pattern of deformation for heterogenous or cracked microporous media.