110th Anniversary: Commentary: Perspectives on Adsorption of Complex Mixtures

Abstract

The development of new adsorbents or new adsorption separation processes has the potential to bring enormous energy and cost savings to the chemical process industry. Achieving success in this area requires a detailed understanding of how a proposed adsorbent performs under realistic conditions, but most research studies focus on idealized process streams. This critical lack of data on adsorption of complex mixtures represents a major barrier to growth in the development of new separation systems. This commentary discusses the persistent nature of the mixture-adsorption knowledge gap, while providing some historical framework, and provides several strategies that researchers might adopt to move toward true multicomponent adsorption studies.