SESAMI APP: An Accessible Interface for Surface Area Calculation of Materials from Adsorption Isotherms

Abstract

Accurate characterization of surface area is critical for understanding a material’s properties and performance. The most widely used approach to calculate a material’s gravimetric surface area, i.e. surface area per unit mass, is the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) method (Brunauer et al., 1938). The BET method computes the surface area of a material given the adsorption isotherm of a probe gas (i.e. N₂ or Ar) in that material. Many researchers either obtain the BET area from commercial software that comes with measurement equipment, or perform the analyses manually on a spreadsheet, which is time-consuming and nearly impossible for some types of isotherms. Furthermore, these two approaches lead to large variability in BET-calculated areas (Osterrieth et al., 2022). These challenges have motivated the development of programs for the automated and standardized calculation of BET areas (Datar et al., 2020; Iacomi & Llewellyn, 2019; Osterrieth et al., 2022; Sadeghi et al., 2020; Sinha et al., 2019).