Study on the Adsorption of Trace Water in N-Methyl-pyrrolidone Solvents by A-Type Molecular Sieves

N-Methyl-pyrrolidone (NMP) is an important coating solvent for the production of lithium batteries, and its water content will greatly affect the coating quality and energy density of lithium batteries, which needs to be reduced to 200 ppm. The current vacuum distillation technology suffers from high operating costs and high energy consumption, whereas the pervaporation technology only achieves solvent dehydration up to 99.5%. Therefore, it is of great significance to carry out the study of trace water removal from NMP solvents. In this paper, the A-type molecular sieve adsorption method was used to remove trace water from the NMP solvent, and the effects of molecular sieve type, particle size, adsorption temperature, feeding amount, and contact time on the dehydration performance of NMP system were first investigated. Adsorbed at 25 °C for 240 min at a feeding amount of 120 g/L, 3A molecular sieves were able to reduce the water content of the NMP solvent from 5000 to 140 ppm. Second, Langmuir and Freundlich equations were used to fit the static isothermal adsorption data, and the results showed a better correlation of the Langmuir equation. Then, the adsorption kinetics and diffusion mechanism were analyzed by the kinetic model and the Crank single-pore diffusion model. The R2 of the pseudo-first-order kinetic model was 0.9993, which was more suitable for describing the process of adsorption of water from the NMP solvent by 3A molecular sieves, and the effective diffusion coefficient De = 2.986 × 10–8 cm2/s was calculated for the Crank single-pore adsorption model, which proved water molecules on the 3A molecular sieve. The diffusion of water molecules on the inner surface of the pores is the controlling step of the adsorption process. Finally, the fixed-bed dynamic penetration curves were investigated to obtain the experimental data of fixed-bed adsorption, and the experimental data were fitted using the Thomas and Yoon–Nelson models, which showed that both models could describe the adsorption behavior of trace water in NMP solvents on 3A molecular sieves. This study provides a new idea for the removal of trace water in NMP systems, and a series of model fitting parameters provide basic data for industrial scale-up.