Adsorption and Adsorbent Materials

Principal Investigator

Ana Paula Carvalho
Assistant Professor, PhD Universidade de Lisboa (1996)

Research

The central long-term goal of the Adsorption and Adsorbent Materials group is to develop porous materials and explore their potentialities as adsorbents, catalysts or catalysts supports or as matrixes for drug delivery systems. Materials are of various types: carbon materials from sub products of agricultural or industrial activities or by template methodologies; natural-clay based solids; metal-organic frameworks.

The solids are assayed in different process:
-adsorbents for removal of pollutants from liquid phase
-adsorbents for gas separation and purification
-drug delivery systems
-support for the heterogenization of homogenous catalysts
-catalysts and matrix for bifunctional catalysts.

The abovementioned studies allow to obtain porous materials for relevant applications, such as the separation of alkenes from alkane/alkene mixtures, the purification (upgrade) of biogas and natural gas by removing carbon dioxide and nitrogen and the removal of emergent pollutants from water. These applications allied to the fact that a great number of the solids are obtained from residues or sub products of agricultural or industrial activities, frame the studies in the strategic area entitled Sustainable Chemistry for Functional Molecules and Materials.

On the other hand, the work focused on the slow releasing of nitric oxide for therapeutic applications fits in the other strategic area defined by CQB viz. Biochemical Regulation, Disease Etiology, and Therapeutics