Cracking specific adsorbents

An interesting example of a large specific surface which is wholly external in nature is provided by a dispersed aerosol composed of fine particles free of cracks and fissures. As soon as the aerosol settles out, of course, its particles come into contact with one another and form aggregates but if the particles are spherical, more particularly if the material is hard, the particle-to-particle contacts will be very small in area the interparticulate junctions will then be so weak that many of them will become broken apart during mechanical handling, or be prized open by the film of adsorbate during an adsorption experiment. In favourable cases the flocculated specimen may have so open a structure that it behaves, as far as its adsorptive properties are concerned, as a completely non-porous material. Solids of this kind are of importance because of their relevance to standard adsorption isotherms (cf. Section 2.12) which play a fundamental role in procedures for the evaluation of specific surface area and pore size distribution by adsorption methods. 

This review will endeavor to outline some of the advantages of Raman Spectroscopy and so stimulate interest among workers in the field of surface chemistry to utilize Raman Spectroscopy in the study of surface phenomena. Up to the present time, most of the work has been directed to adsorption on oxide surfaces such as silicas and aluminas. An examination of the spectrum of a molecule adsorbed on such a surface may reveal information as to whether the molecule is physically or chemically adsorbed and whether the adsorption site is a Lewis acid site (an electron deficient site which can accept electrons from the adsorbate molecule) or a Bronsted acid site (a site which can donate a proton to an adsorbate molecule). A specific example of a surface having both Lewis and Bronsted acid sites is provided by silica-aluminas which are used as cracking catalysts. 

Clearly the rate equation for the cracking of methane, i.e. for the coke formation is not fundamentally different from that of one of the main reactions (12). What remains to be done is to link the coke content of the catalyst to the rate of the main reactions. Thereby a specific aspect of coke formation on Ni/alumina catalysts has to be accounted for, namely whisker formation. The rate equation (16) is not directly applicable because it contains the concentration of coke adsorbed on the Ni-surface, which is not accessible, just like Cc 4., C. i,... The latter are eliminated through adsorption-isotherms in favor of the measurable gas phase partial pressures PcH4. Ph2> but this is not possible for coke. What is done in the derivation of (5) and (6), where the same problem is already encountered, is to manipulate the expressions so as to factor out the Cq, thus yielding the... 

An important parameter of bulk powders is the specific surface area S, expressed per unit weight. The specific surface area measurement includes the cracks, crevices, nooks, and crannies present in the particles. To include these features in the surface-area measurement, methods have been developed to probe these convoluted surfaces through adsorption by either a gas or a liquid [95-97]. The most widely used surface area measurement technique is the absorption of a monolayer of gas, typically krypton or nitrogen as the adsorbate gas in helium as an inert diluent, using the method developed by Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller [98], known as the BET method. This method utilizes the BET equation... 

Some specific corrosion environments, in the presence of applied tensile stress on the metal siuface (above some threshold vtilue), can cause stress-corrosion cracking (SCC). The somce of stresses can be extemtil, but residual stresses can tilso cause SCC failures. Specific corrosive pollutants, which may contribute to the SCC of carbon steels, are for example, the carbonates in water. Sulfide stress cracking (SSC) commonly occms on the outside of a pipe where sulfate-reducing bacteria me present at a soil pH of 3-7. Because of the produced iron sulfide (FeS), which adsorbs readily on the steel surface, hydrogen atoms generated... 

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