Analysis of Dual Diffusion and Non-linear Adsorption Isotherm with a Time Lag Method

Abstract

This paper presents an application of the time lag method in the analysis of an adsorption system, where dual diffusion mechanism is assumed to exist and the equilibrium relationship between the fluid and adsorbed phases is non-linear. The derived time lag is expressed in terms of system parameters and operating conditions in the form of a quadrature. The feature of this solution is that the relative contribution of the pore and surface diffusions is a strong function of upstream pressure when the time lag experiment is operated over the non-linear range of the adsorption isotherm. It is this nice feature that we take advantage of to determine the pore and surface diffusivities without resorting to isolation of the pore diffusion by using non-adsorbing gas as a reference, as usually done in many other work. This advantage is not manifested in linear systems where the relative contribution of the pore and surface diffusions is a constant, rendering the delineation of these two processes impossible. Effects of various parameters on the utility of this time lag method are discussed in this paper, and application of the method is demonstrated with experimental data of sulfur dioxide adsorption onto Carbolac carbon (Proc. Roy. Soc., A271, 1–18, 1963).