Diffusion terms Links

The sorption coefficient (K) in Equation (2.84) is the term linking the concentration of a component in the fluid phase with its concentration in the membrane polymer phase. Because sorption is an equilibrium term, conventional thermodynamics can be used to calculate solubilities of gases in polymers to within a factor of two or three. However, diffusion coefficients (D) are kinetic terms that reflect the effect of the surrounding environment on the molecular motion of permeating components. Calculation of diffusion coefficients in liquids and gases is possible, but calculation of diffusion coefficients in polymers is much more difficult. In the long term, the best hope for accurate predictions of diffusion in polymers is the molecular dynamics calculations described in an earlier section. However, this technique is still under development and is currently limited to calculations of the diffusion of small gas molecules in amorphous polymers the... 

In the second term on the right-hand side, we recognize a turbulent diffusion term, since it takes the form div(x--VA ) or div(/ r-Ve). Diffusion is linked to the... 

Each submolecule will experience a frictional drag with the solvent represented by the frictional coefficient /0. This drag is related to the frictional coefficient of the monomer unit (0- If there are x monomer units per link then the frictional coefficient of a link is x(0- If we aPply a step strain to the polymer chain it will deform and its entropy will fall. In order to attain its equilibrium conformation and maximum entropy the chain will rearrange itself by diffusion. The instantaneous elastic response can be thought of as being due to an entropic spring . The drag on each submolecule can be treated in terms of the motion of the N+ 1 ends of the submolecules. We can think of these as beads linked... 

The diffusion coefficient is linked to the intrinsic dissolution rate constant ( i) as expressed by the term... 

A poorly balanced water distribution in the fuel cell can severely impair its performance and cause long-term effects due to structural degradation. If PEMs or CLs are too dry, proton conductivity will be poor, potentially leading to excessive joule heating, which could affect the structural integrity of the cell. Too much water in diffusion media (CLs and GDLs) blocks the gaseous supply of reactants. As these examples show, all processes in PEECs are linked to water distribution and the balance of water fluxes. 

In this section, we begin the description of Brownian motion in terms of stochastic process. Here, we establish the link between stochastic processes and diffusion equations by giving expressions for the drift velocity and diffusivity of a stochastic process whose probability distribution obeys a desired diffusion equation. The drift velocity vector and diffusivity tensor are defined here as statistical properties of a stochastic process, which are proportional to the first and second moments of random changes in coordinates over a short time period, respectively. In Section VILA, we describe Brownian motion as a random walk of the soft generalized coordinates, and in Section VII.B as a constrained random walk of the Cartesian bead positions. 

The diffusion coefficients Du and D22 are the principal or "self diffusion coefficients and the off-diagonal quantities D12 and D21 are mutual diffusion coefficients. Even when Onsager s reciprocal relations (31) are valid for the appropriate flow equations so that D12 = D21, there are still three diffusion coefficients generally required to describe the diffusion process. It is noted that even if dC Jbx = 0, the flow of Component 1 is linked to that of Component 2 through the term — Di2dC2/dx, and is not zero. 

Carrier facilitated transport involves a combination of chemical reaction and diffusion. One way to model the process is to calculate the equilibrium between the various species in the membrane phase and to link them by the appropriate rate expressions to the species in adjacent feed and permeate solutions. An expression for the concentration gradient of each species across the membrane is then calculated and can be solved to give the membrane flux in terms of the diffusion coefficients, the distribution coefficients, and the rate constants for all the species involved in the process [41,42], Unfortunately, the resulting expressions are too complex to be widely used. 

Equations (10) are generally valid for both liquid and gas phases if reactions take place there. They represent nothing but a differential mass balance for the film region with the account of the source term due to the reaction. To link this balance to the process variables like component concentrations, some additional relationships - often called constitutive relations (see Ref. [16]) - are necessary. For the component fluxes Ni, these constitutive relations result from the multicomponent diffusion description (Eqs. (1), (2)) for the source terms, from the reaction kinetics description. The latter strongly depends on the specific reaction mechanism [27]. The reaction rate expressions lli usually represent nonlinear dependencies on the mixture composition and temperature of the corresponding phase. 

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