Industrially, thermal swing adsorption using molecular sieves is a common technique to dehydrate natural gas. These systems are designed to operate for years at a time, with adsorbent materials subjected to thousands of cycles. Despite all the efforts into adsorption research, there is very little open literature on the degradation of these materials over prolonged cycling before selection for service. Herein, we describe a novel instrument, capable of thousands of thermal swing adsorption cycles in a short period of time for multiple samples and different gas compositions. The degrading of zeolite 4A, zeolite 13X and three different pore size silica gels was investigated using this instrument. By measuring the change in performance of the materials after 5000 temperature swing adsorption cycles, insights into the mechanisms of degradation and the role of CO2 in the degradation have been elucidated.
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