Abstract
A study has been carried out to investigate the kinetics of surfactant decomposition during ageing of the membrane (organic phase) of the emulsion used in an liquid surfactant membrane (LSM) process for metals separation. At this stage of research, the process of Span 80 hydrolysis has been exclusively studied in the membrane phase, and thus, the effect of the carrier di-2-ethylhexyl phosphoric acid (D2EHPA) on the rate of hydrolysis. The effect of tri-n-butyl phosphate (TBP) and the membrane composition on the kinetics of Span 80 hydrolysis have been studied as well. It has been found that the bimolecular irreversible second-order kinetic model describes fairly well the experimental data. A numerical best-fit routine of a polynomial form has been exploited to modify the final model, which takes into account the TBP effect on the result rate of the proposed model.
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