Methane Storage on Nanoporous Carbons

This chapter reviews the requirements for a nanoporous carbon material to be used as an adsorbent for methane storage. Due to the necessity to achieve a large gravimetric and volumetric storage capacity in real applications (e.g., onboard storage for transportation vehicles), a proper carbon material must fulfill certain requirements in terms of porous structure, pore geometry, pore size distribution, and packing density. The effect of these parameters on the methane adsorption/storage capacity will be revised both from a theoretical and experimental perspective. State-of-the-art values for excess and storage capacity for the best performing carbon materials will be summarized. Last but not least, heat and mass transfer limitations will be revised due to the dramatic effect that these scarcely explored variables can have in the performance of the final prototype.