Towards a new description of the inner space of amorphous porous carbons
Maurizio Cossi
University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Visio : https://univ-nantes-fr.zoom.us/j/84576001578?pwd=2yHtI3N2g2iNumDaXqYtyBMt4azR6A.1
Adsorption processes in nanoporous materials are of great importance in a number of fields, involving gas storage, separation and purification, sensoring, heterogeneous and hybrid catalysis, and others. The knowledge of the materials structure, and of its relation to adsorbent/adsorbate interactions, strongly influence the interpretation of experimental results and the design of new, more efficient adsorbents.
The description of the porous volume distributions and the measure of specific surface areas are extremely important in this framework.
We will rapidly review the modern techniques used to characterize the porous structure of various materials (activated carbons, zeolites, MOF etc.) along with the most recent theoretical methods that can support the experimental characterization. In particular, we will present the newest computational approach PoLA (Porosity Local Analysis), designed to describe the porous volume and surface both in atomistic models and in real samples, and to predict the adsorption properties.
[1] A. Zoccante et al., ACS Omega 2025, 10, 31623
[2] M. Cossi et al., Carbon 2026, 257, 121713
