Breakthrough analysis has widely been explored for the dynamic separation of gaseous mixtures in porous materials. In general, breakthrough experiments measure the components of a flowing gas when a gaseous mixture is injected into a column filled with an adsorbent material. In this paper, we report on the design and fabrication of a breakthrough curve measurement device to study the dynamic adsorptive separation of hydrogen isotopologues in porous materials. Using the designed system, an experiment was conducted involving a 1:1 mixture of hydrogen and deuterium passed through a column filled with zeolite 13X (1 g). At room temperature, both hydrogen and deuterium were adsorbed in negligible amounts; however, at a temperature of 77 K, deuterium was preferentially adsorbed over hydrogen. The selectivity was different from that in the existing literature due to the different sample shapes, measurement methods, and column structures, but was at a similar level to that of cryogenic distillation (1.5).

A zeolite material with a Si/Al molar ratio of 1.2 was synthesized by changing the NaOH/CFA ratio of coal fly ash (CFA) via a fusion/hydrothermal reaction in the HD thermal power plant. The change in the crystal structure of the zeolite was confirmed using XRD and SEM, and the ammonia adsorption capacities of the synthesized zeolitic materials and a commercial zeolite (Na-A zeolite) were analyzed via an ammonia temperature-programmed desorption (NH3-TPD) process. The SEM and XRD results revealed out the zeolitic materials from the coal fly ash maintained a hexagonal Linde-type crystal structure similar to that of Na-A zeolite, but the crystallinity of the synthesized zeolitic material was reduced due to impurities. The NH3 adsorption capacity, determined from the NH3-TPD analysis of was 1.122 mmol/g of the synthesized zeolitic material, which was lower than the NH3 adsorption capacity of the Na-A zeolite.