Diffusion barriers, studies

If the mass transfer coefficient is sufficiently low, the emission will be so slow that the ventilation can manage to remove the formaldehyde at almost the same rate as it is liberated, resulting in a very low formaldehyde concentration in the air. This presentation deals with what can be achieved in terms of reduced mass transfer coefficient and emission rate by applying some sort of diffusion barrier to the surface of the particleboard. The diffusion barriers studied comprise overlays or surface finishes commonly applied when particleboard is used as a building material, such as wall paper, painting and floor covering, but even overlays that are used by the furniture and joinery industries, such as veneers, melamine facing and resin saturated paper foils (finish foils). 

To cross the filter, the solute must diffuse through the filter pores. Therefore, pore size, density, and tortuosity must be taken into consideration. Many filter configurations are commercially available and have been employed for these types of studies. In general, the greater the pore size and porosity, the less the potential for the filter to act as a significant diffusion barrier. For small solutes, the filter will probably not present much of a problem. However, as the molecular size of the solute increases and approaches the dimension of the pore, these considerations become more important. In principle, solute diffusion through the... 

Faujasites of the X and Y type are the most frequently studied zeolite structure type for this reachon. Because the key step in the reachon is a hydride hansfer, zeolites with low Si02/Al203 ratios are favored. The other preferred characteristic is a large pore opening and hence a low diffusion barrier to product diffusion. These details and others were reviewed recently by Feller et al. [50] (Table 12.8). 

In the light of these observations and the newer trends in product formulation, it was decided to study the in vitro release and permeation of propranolol hydrochloride from various hydrophilic polymeric matrices using the cellulose membrane and the hairless mouse skin as the diffusion barriers and to evaluate the effects of some of the additive ingredients known to enhance drug release from dermatological bases. 

Interestingly, the use of mucolytic drugs, which alter the viscoelasticity of mucus, has been shown to increase the absorption of intranasally administered human growth hormone (22 kDa). In contrast, other studies have shown that antibodies (150-970 kDa) are able to diffuse through cervical mucus relatively unimpeded, a finding that suggests that the diffusion barrier to antibodies presented by mucus in the nasal cavity might be relatively minor [12]. 

Perhaps the original hope for these polymers was that they would act simultaneously as immobilisation matrix and mediator, facilitating electron transfer between the enzyme and electrode and eliminating the need for either O2 or an additional redox mediator. This did not appear to be the case for polypyrrole, and in fact while a copolymer of pyrrole and a ferrocene modified pyrrole did achieve the mediation (43), the response suggested that far from enhancing the charge transport, the polypyrrole acted as an inert diffusion barrier. Since these early reports, other mediator doped polypyrroles have been reported (44t45) and curiosity about the actual role of polypyrrole or any other electrochemically deposited polymer, has lead to many studies more concerned with the kinetics of the enzyme linked reactions and the film transport properties, than with the achievement of a real biosensor. 

Two alternative approaches exist. The first one involves significantly lowering the temperature to values where the diffusion of vacancies can be observed with a technique like STM. At lower temperatures a surface vacancy can then be artificially created by ion bombardment or direct removal of an atom by the tip. This approach has been applied successfully to several semiconductor surfaces [29-31]. For metal surfaces, although vacancy creation at a step by direct tip manipulation of the surface has been demonstrated [32], to our knowledge, no studies have been published where the diffusion of artificially created vacancies in a terrace has successfully been measured. The second approach involves the addition of small amounts of appropriate impurities that serve as tracer atoms in the first layer of the surface [20-24]. The presence and passage of a surface vacancy is indirectly revealed by the motion of these embedded atoms. If one seeks to measure both the formation energy and the diffusion barrier of surface vacancies explicitly, a combination of these two approaches is needed. 

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