Desulfurization of Liquid Hydrocarbon Fuels with Microporous and Mesoporous Materials: Metal-Organic Frameworks, Zeolites, and Mesoporous Silicas

Abstract

This review discusses potential microporous and mesoporous materials that can address the issue of sulfur reduction via adsorptive desulfurization (ADS) with a focus on liquid fuels. During the transition to cleaner energy sources in the face of climate change, liquid fossil fuels will likely continue to provide a significant share of the world's energy demand. Fossil fuels possess a substantial amount of deleterious sulfur compounds that reduce the efficiency of energy production, damage the environment, and harm human health. There has recently been a large push to address these challenges that sulfur presents. ADS is one of the most promising techniques to reduce the sulfur content of liquid fuels in a cost-effective manner. The three key materials that have attracted a great deal of attention for their application in ADS are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolites, and mesoporous silicas. These materials have emerged as potential candidates for ADS because of their high surface area, tunable structure, and advantageous porosity. Research interest has been generated around finding unique approaches to modify these materials that increase their selectivity, stability, adsorption capacity, and reusability. A deeper mechanistic understanding of the adsorption of various sulfur compounds on these novel materials has been pursued experimentally and with the aid of models. This review seeks to discuss the recent advances made surrounding the most promising ADS materials while providing an outlook on where advancements still need to be made.

Loading and Release of Charged and Neutral Fluorescent Dyes into and from Mesoporous Materials: A Key Role for Sensing Applications

“…However, in the last years the scope of this technology has been expanded toward applications in a variety of sectors such as agriculture [3,4], photovoltaic cells [5] external coatings [6] or personal care and cosmetics [7], employing as nanoparticles drug carriers (NPs) of organic [8][9][10] or inorganic [11] nature. Among these materials, microporous and mesoporous materials, due to their chemical inertness, homogeneous porosity and large internal surface area, have attracted considerable research interest for applications on the fields of drug delivery [12][13][14], catalysis [15][16][17], filtration and separation [18,19], gas adsorption [20,21] and storage [22,23], enzyme immobilisation [24,25], biomedical tissue regeneration [26,27], environmental remediation [28][29][30], chemical/biochemical sensing [31][32][33] and theranostics [34,35] mostly as nano-or microparticles, but also in core/shell formats or in combination with other properties such as magnetic ones [36,37]. Whereas typical microporous materials are crystalline framework solids, such as zeolites [38] with pore dimensions between 10-14 Å [39,40], mesoporous silica materials of the MCM-41 type, discovered in 1992 by researchers of the Mobil Research and Development Corporation ...…”

Theoretical and Experimental Study of the Adsorption Capacity of Transition Metal Acetates in the Process of Desulfurization of a Model Hydrocarbon Fuel

“…For small oil refineries that are not equipped with hydrogen production or catalytic reforming plants, the development of alternative nonhydrogenation methods is important. Among the alternative methods of desulfurization, there are oxidative and extraction desulfurization, biodesulfurization and adsorption [3]. Adsorption desulfurization is an effective method of removing acidic sulfur compounds from hydrocarbon raw materials.…”

Desulfurization through Photocatalytic Oxidation: A Critical Review

“…The former two methods can be performed under mild conditions, such as relative low temperature and ambient pressure. For instance, adsorption desulfurization (ADS), a promising physical technology using zeolite, [6,7] metal organic skeleton, [8] or metal and metal oxide as adsorbents [9,10] to achieve deep desulfurization (sulfur content <1 ppm), has advantages of simple manipulation as well as economic and environmental benignity [11] . Although ADS can obtain ultra‐high desulfurization efficiency, its adsorption capacity and adsorbent regeneration are rather limited [12] .…”