Adsorption of Nonelectrolytes from Dilute Solution

The adsorption of nonelectrolytes at the solid-solution interface may be viewed in terms of two somewhat different physical pictures. In the first, the adsorption is confined to a monolayer next to the surface, with the implication that succeeding layers are virtually normal bulk solution. The picture is similar to that for the chemisorption of gases (see Chapter XVIII) and arises under the assumption that solute-solid interactions decay very rapidly with distance. Unlike the chemisorption of gases, however, the heat of adsorption from solution is usually small it is more comparable with heats of solution than with chemical bond energies. 

In the second picture, an interfacial layer or region persists over several molecular diameters due to a more slowly decaying interaction potential with the solid (note Section X-7C). This situation would then be more like the physical adsorption of vapors (see Chapter XVII), which become multilayer near the saturation vapor pressure (e.g.. Fig. X-15). Adsorption from solution, from this point of view, corresponds to a partition between bulk and interfacial phases here the Polanyi potential concept may be used (see Sections X-7C, XI-1 A, and XVII-7). 

While both models find some experimental support, the monolayer has been much more amenable to simple analysis. As a consequence, most of the discussion in this chapter is in terms of die monolayer model, although occasional 

The moles of a solute species adsorbed per gram of adsorbent nl can be expressed in terms of the mole fraction of the solute on the surface N and the moles of adsorption sites per gram as 

Various functional forms for / have been proposed either as a result of empirical observation or in terms of specific models. A particularly important example of the latter is that known as the Langmuir adsorption equation [2]. By analogy with the derivation for gas adsorption (see Section XVII-3), the Langmuir model assumes the surface to consist of adsorption sites, each having an area a. All adsorbed species interact only with a site and not with each other, and adsorption is thus limited to a monolayer. Related lattice models reduce to the Langmuir model under these assumptions [3,4]. In the case of adsorption from solution, however, it seems more plausible to consider an alternative phrasing of the model. Adsorption is still limited to a monolayer, but this layer is now regarded as an ideal two-dimensional solution of equal-size solute and solvent molecules of area a. Thus lateral interactions, absent in the site picture, cancel out in the ideal solution however, in the first version is a properly of the solid lattice, while in the second it is a properly of the adsorbed species. Both models attribute differences in adsorption behavior entirely to differences in adsorbate-solid interactions. Both present adsorption as a competition between solute and solvent. 

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