Influence of alternative cations distribution in AgxLi96-x-LSX on dehydration kinetics and its selective adsorption performance for N2 and O2

Adsorption characteristics of pure gases N2 and O2 on various silver exchanged low silica X-type (AgxLi96-x-LSX) zeolites were investigated. The equilibrium adsorption isotherms of N2 and O2 were measured at 273 and 298 K. Textual and structural properties of parent and resultant AgxLi96-x-LSX were characterized by XRD, BET surface area, and SEM techniques. Kinetics of their thermal dehydration were studied by exploiting thermogravimetric and differential data (TG-DTG) obtained at three heating rates (5, 10 and 15 K) using two model-free (Kissinger and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa) and one model fitting (Coats-Redfern) methods. Forty one mechanism functions were used to evaluate kinetic triplet (activation energy, frequency factor, and most probable mechanism/model) for different stages of dehydration. Results revealed that the impact of very small content of silver on the adsorption of N2 is pronounced and attributed to weak chemical bonds formed between N2 and Ag+ clusters due to strong adsorption of N2 at low pressure, whereas O2 adsorption is affected to a negligible extent. In addition, the N2/O2 adsorption selectivity shows unexpected low values for Ag87.08Li7.94Na0.98-LSX with higher Ag+ content (91.00 %), which might be due to low crystalline water content as well as Ag+ clusters located at SIII sites. N2 adsorption strongly depends on temperature as higher adsorption occurs at low temperature 273 K as compared to 298 K.