Abstract
Diffusion of mobile products produced in reactive barrier membranes was studied theoretically and experimentally. A diaphragm cell in which a reactive solute challenges a reactive membrane was adopted for this purpose. A diffusion equation with a reaction term describes the behavior of a mobile product before breakthrough of the solute, while the common diffusion equation governs the system after the breakthrough. An approximate, analytical solution was derived to this diffusion problem based on a pseudo-steady state assumption, and the result agreed closely with a numerical solution without assumptions. A poly(vinyl alcohol) membrane containing zinc oxide particles was challenged by hydrochloric acid in a diffusion experiment to validate the theoretical predictions. Diffusion of zinc chloride, the mobile reaction product, was monitored using a colorimetric method. The experimental results matched the analytical model.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 111-119 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Journal of Membrane Science |
| Volume | 291 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 15 2007 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We appreciate financial support from the Environmental Management Science Program of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, grant DE-FG07-02ER63509. Other support came from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant F49620-01-1-0333. We also thank the University of Minnesota Graduate School for awarding a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to Tsutomu Shimotori and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Keywords
- Breakthrough
- Diffusion
- Modeling
- Products
- Reactive membranes