Iron doped aluminophosphate molecular sieve with improved adsorption capacity for water vapor

With a characteristic of S-shape isotherms for water vapor adsorption, aluminophosphate molecular sieve with AFI type (AlPO-5) has been considered as an up-and-coming adsorbent for the utilization in the adsorption cooling and heating (ACH) system. In order to improve its adsorption performance, iron doped AlPO-5 (FeAPO-5) with variable Fe loading was synthesized by microwave hydrothermal method. The effects of the iron doping content on the structure and adsorption performance were systematically investigated. The analysis results of X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–visible spectroscopy (UV–Vis-DR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the iron ion was incorporated into aluminophosphate molecular sieves with a typical AFI structure as that of AlPO-5 through the isomorphous substitution. As the iron content of FeAlPO-5s increased, the isolated FeIII decreased, while oligonuclear FeIII and nanosized FeIII increased, besides, the static adsorption curves showed that the adsorption capacity of FeAlPO-5 increased first and then decrease. After iron modifying, the crystallinity and morphology of crystals was improved, and the adsorption performance increased from 0.185 g/g (AlPO-5A) to 0.235 g/g (FeAlPO-5), while the desorption performance of FeAlPO-5 (95.69 kJ/mol) was close to that of AlPO-5A (81.59 kJ/mol).