Porosity and surface area are important characteristics of solid materials that highly determine the properties and performance of catalysts, sorbents, medicines, pigments, cosmetics, and so on. “How active is your catalyst” and “How efficient will medicines work” are questions related to features like the presence of pores, porosity, the pore size and of course the surface area. These parameters can experimentally be investigated with different types of porosity measurements. More details on all these measurements and analysis techniques are separately treated in the sub-menu on the right and a short summary is given below.
Porosity analysis by physical gas adsorption (physisorption) and mercury intrusion porosimetry is used to characterize pores and surface area related parameters. While gas adsorption is merely used to analyse smaller pores, mercury porosimetry is particularly applicable to porous materials exhibiting larger pores. Our laboratory can measure specific surface areas (BET surface area or related methodologies), pore volume, pore size distributions in the micro-, meso- and macropore range (0.5 nm – 800 µm). Chemical gas adsorption (chemisorption) focusses more on active metal surface area and metal dispersion of various materials such as catalysts. Covering all these various parameters can be done by using many dedicated instruments and experimental conditions for each application.
Disclaimer: The results of analysis techniques describing porosity and porous properties are obtained via idealized models and are therefore not necessarily representing geometrical values
