ABSTRACT
Experimental Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Nitrogen Gas Adsorption Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Mercury Intrusion Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Experimental Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Effect of Mercury Removal Method
on Silica Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608
Effects of Mercury Intrusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Pore Structure of Sorbsil C500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Mercury Intrusion Experiments with
Silica Spheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Pore Structure of Sorbsil C200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610
Pore Structure of Sorbsil C60 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611
Acknowledgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 612
Measuring the nitrogen sorption isotherms of a number of silicas both before and after analysis by
mercury intrusion demonstrates that mercury intrusion can lead to compression of silica structures
and that this compression can account for differences in pore size distributions measured by the
nitrogen sorption and mercury intrusion techniques. These techniques are widely employed in the
structural characterization of porous solids, often independently, despite the fact that very often the
pore size distributions obtained by the two techniques fail to agree. Compression effects must be recog-
nized because use of incorrect information can lead to misconceptions regarding the structure of a
material.
