(421a) Multicomponent Ppb Competitive Adsorption in the Presence of Varying Relative Humidity

Contaminant gas removal is a critical process for current and future power supply systems including fuel cells, gas turbines (GT) or a combination on ships. Jet fuels such as JP-5 are widely used in marine power supply systems, resulting in emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The contaminants can affect the fuel cell performance of both anode and cathode, even exposed to an ultra-low concentration (<1 ppm).  In this work, toluene and thiophene were introduced as gas phase contaminants at various initial concentrations (0.1 ppm, 0.2 ppm and 0.4 ppm). A packed bed consisting of activated carbon was used as an adsorbent operated at a face velocity of 0.9 m/s. Concentration of contaminants upstream and downstream was determined by GC/FID. The experiments for adsorption behavior (e.g. breakthrough time, saturation time and separation time) were carried out on different types of activated carbon with pretreatment. BET surface area, average pore volume and pore-size distribution were measured for each type of activated carbon in order to characterize their adsorption capacity. Furthermore, the effect of relative humidity (RH) was studied at such trace concentrations.