Integrating gas sorption with mercury porosimetry

Previous work has shown that it is possible to use intergrated nitrogen sorption and mercury porosimetry experiments to determine the distribution of average pore length with pore diameter for mesoporous solids. In this work, the previous data analysis method has been generalised such that it is also suitable for application to samples with higher levels of mercury entrapment than before. This generalisation of the theory has facilitated the ability to use a series of progressively larger mercury scanning loops, in integrated gas sorption and porosimetry experiments, to potentially determine the full pore length distribution for pores of a given diameter, and the distribution of pore co-ordination number. The new analysis has been applied to a silica catalyst support.