The heat and mass transfer performance of facile synthesized silica gel/carbon-fiber based consolidated composite adsorbents developed by freeze-drying method

A series of experimental investigations had been performed to analyze the heat and mass transfer performance for two novel types of silica-based consolidated composite adsorbents developed by the freeze-drying method. The first type of adsorbent is silica gel consolidated with carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) (SC), while the other is silica gel consolidated with CMC and carbon fiber powder (SCC). Results indicate that the thermal conductivity of consolidated composite adsorbents increases with the mass proportion of carbon fiber powder, while it decreases with the increasing moisture content in the preparation process of the adsorbents. When the mass ratio of silica gel, CMC, and carbon fiber powder is 4:1:4, the highest thermal conductivity of consolidated composite adsorbent obtained from experiments reaches 1.66 W m^?1 K^?1, which is 13.4 times greater than that of pure silica gel. Furthermore, the results of macroporous properties analysis of typical samples including SC20 and SCC20 (where the 20 means that the undried samples have a water content of 20% by mass during the preparation process) show that heat transfer additives effectively improve the macroporous porosity and permeability of the consolidated composite adsorbents. The study on adsorption dynamic performance indicates that the freeze-drying method helps to improve the adsorption performance including adsorption rate and equilibrium water uptake. The experimental results also show that the mass transfer coefficient K of the two typical samples are approximately stable at 5 × 10^?3 s^?1 when the adsorption temperature is ranged between 30 and 40°C, which are almost twice the corresponding values of the samples developed by heating–drying method. Therefore, the proposed approach which is the consolidation with heat transfer additives combined with freeze-drying method is effective for simultaneously enhancing the heat and mass transfer performance of the silica gel adsorbents.