The Centre for Textural Studies (CTS) was founded in the early 80th as the part of the Department of Catalysis and Reaction Engineering in the Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals constituted in 1961. CTS has long-standing experiences with characterization of porous materials and study of transport processes in pores. Textural measurements of porous samples both from the Institute as well as from outside if it are performed.
Because of the unique nature of pore structure of different materials the pore structure characteristics relevant to transport in pores have to be determined experimentally. Two approaches are used in this respect:
- standard textural analyses
- evaluation of simple transport processes taking place in the analyzed porous solid
The advantage of standard textural analyses derives from the complexity of available experimental methods and evaluation procedures (physical adsorption of gases, high-pressure mercury porosimetry, liquid expulsion permporometry (LEPP), permporometry with pores blocked by capillary condensation, etc.).
The relevance of the evaluation of simple transport processes stems from the possibility to use the same pore-structure model for description of simple transport processes as well as for a more complicated, e.g. industrial, applied process. Pore-structure models characterize transport in pores through transport parameters, i.e. parameters that are material constants of the porous solids and, hence, are independent of temperature, pressure and kind and concentration of gases.