Highly Porous Y Zeolite Synthesized With Small Amounts of THF Co-Solvent for Efficient Adsorption of Acetone

Volatile organic compounds adsorption of zeolite was highly dependent on its structures. Adding organic additives was an effective way to improve the pore structure. However, introducing a large number of additives caused crystallinity reduction and impurity phase generation, which were unfavorable for adsorption. In this work, Y zeolite with high specific surface area and micropore volume was synthesized using bits of tetrahydrofuran (0–1.7 mol% THF) as co-solvent, which attributed to the filling of the co-solvent and the template role of Na⁺ with co-solvent. The highly porous structure and the increase of Na⁺ endowed Y zeolite with superior acetone adsorption performance (0.178 g/g), and it performed better cyclic property after five adsorption–desorption cycles. In addition, the adsorption mechanism was analyzed via adsorption kinetics and density functional theory calculations. The strategy of changing the pore structure and keeping high crystallinity by small amount of THF addition offers evident engineering and economic advantage.