Natural gas, a mixture of light hydrocarbons has clean burning characteristics led to increment of its use in vehicles as a clean fuel. Natural gas contains mostly methane and ethane. These light gases have very high vapor pressure at ambient temperature and their storage require high pressure compression or reduction of temperature extremely.
Activated Carbon is the most important sorbent in ANG process. There are several types of activated carbon and main factors to choose the suitable one are total surface area, density, and pore volume. Total surface area is the most important one among these factors and is calculated through nitrogen adsorption on carbon in square meter per grams of carbon. This parameter can have values between 500 – 1900.
Natural gas comprising more than 20 percent of methane has been used as a fuel for vehicles and that’s because of the low cost and less environmental effects relative to gasoline. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is in gas phase at STP condition. As it has very low density, for unit volume of methane, low amount of energy will be produced, requiring high amounts to be stored in tanks.