Experimentally Verified Alcohol Adsorption Isotherms in Nanoporous Materials from Literature Meta-Analysis

Systematic collection of replicate experimental data via literature meta-analysis is a powerful approach for assessing the reproducibility of physical properties data. In this paper, we use meta-analysis to examine the adsorption equilibrium of alcohols in porous materials using a collection of more than 500 alcohol isotherm measurements. We report consensus isotherms (after rejecting outliers) using experimentally measured replicates for 11 systems with methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol, or 2-methylpropan-1-ol adsorption as well as assess experimental reproducibility for another 50 systems with these adsorbates, 1-butanol or 2-phenylethan-1-ol. Our analysis indicates that ∼20% of reported adsorption isotherms for alcohols are outliers, an observation that is similar to earlier analyses of CO2 adsorption experiments. We compare a variety of replicate experiments using metal-organic framework adsorbents with predictions from molecular simulations using generic force fields in order to examine the ability of these simulations to predict alcohol adsorption in these materials.