Pore Segments Research Articles

Evaluation of mercury porosimeter experiments using a network pore structure model

A square network model has been developed to interpret mercury penetration and retraction behaviour in the widely employed mercury porosimetry technique for investigating pore structure and pore size distribution. A network of arbitrary size is constructed by assembling cylindrical pore segments of equal length and pseudo-random number generation is used to assign pore diameters according to any stipulated size distribution function. Application of the simple Washburn equation then predicts movement of mercury into the network under increasing pressure (penetration) and the corresponding withdrawal under reducing pressure (retraction) The network model is superior to the classical parallel bundle model, since it implicitly produces hysteresis between penetration and retraction, predicts that mercury entrapment on retraction is a result of interconnectedness of pore segments and provides a better estimate of the intrinsic distribution of segment sizes. Comparison with porosimeter experiments on a commercial hydrodesulphurisation catalyst show that the approach can be applied to practical measurements and the model may provide an improved basis for the study of diffusion, reaction and deactivation in catalyst pellets.

Effect of heteroporosity on flux equations for membranes

An investigation is made of the possible errors in simple integrated equations for solute flux across both non-sieving and sieving porous membranes that can result from variations in the membrane structure. Detailed structural models are used, beginning with a membrane consisting of a parallel array of pores and progressing to series--parallel combinations of pore segments of various lengths and cross-sectional areas, with internal cross connections among pore segments allowed. It is shown that there are both upper and lower mathematical bounds on the possible variations that can be produced in a curve of solute flux versus volume flow by arbitrary variation in the membrane structure, subject only to certain general conditions. In particular, the flux equation for a homoporous membrane is a lower bound. The maximum deviations from this lower bound for a membrane of arbitrary structure are only moderately large, and require rather extreme pore size distributions; most distributions introduce only small errors. Implications of these results in studies of real membrane structure and in the design of experiments are discussed.