Significant enhancement of sorption kinetics via boiling-assisted channel templating

Adsorption systems promise to address energy storage, water harvesting, and carbon capture, among other applications in energy and sustainability. Improving the kinetics of the sorbent layer is essential to enable substantial enhancement in the performance of such systems, but challenges remain owing to the highly tortuous and random distribution of adsorbents. Here, we present a boiling -assisted channel-templating (BACT) coating method to enhance the kinetics of sorbent layers. Driven by boiling -induced vapor flow, randomly distributed adsorbents become well aligned, approaching the theoretical minimum tortuosity of porous structures. Using water adsorption in zeolite-coated copper foam, we demonstrate 2x improvement in effective diffusivity. We develop design guidelines to control the porous structure. For AQSOA-Z02 coating, the BACT method was able to reduce tortuosity to 1.09. We show the impact of BACT on adsorptive systems where cyclability can be improved by approximate to 1.7x compared with state-of-the-art coatings. This work demonstrates a simple, low-cost, and scalable approach to enhance sorption kinetics.