Refined Method of Potential Enhancement in the Equilibria Characterization of Activated Carbon. Comparison with GCMC and DFT

In this paper, we present a technique for equilibria characterization of activated carbon having slit-shaped pores. This method was first developed by Do (Do, D. D. A new method for the characterisation of micro−mesoporous materials. Presented at the International Symposium on New Trends in Colloid and Interface Science, September 24−26, 1998, Chiba, Japan) and applied by his group and other groups for characterization of pore size distribution (PSD) as well as adsorption equilibria determination of a wide range of hydrocarbons. It is refined in this paper and compared with the grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulation and density functional theory (DFT). The refined theory results in a good agreement between the pore filling pressure versus pore width and those obtained by GCMC and DFT. Furthermore, our local isotherms are qualitatively in good agreement with those obtained by the GCMC simulations. The main advantage of this method is that it is about 4 orders of magnitude faster than the GCMC simula...