Journal of Membrane Science, Vol.130, No.1-2, 157-172, 1997
The Use of Moment Theory to Interpret Diffusion and Sieving Measurements in Terms of the Pore-Size Distribution in Heteroporous Membranes
Moment theory has been applied to model porous membranes to show that one can place reasonable bounds on the cumulative pore size distribution, the hindered diffusivity or the reflection coefficient of large solutes in a heteroporous membrane by measuring the diffusive permeability to a small solute, the hydraulic permeability and one or two additional transport characteristics. These additional measurements involve either the flux of a small solute at Pe similar to 1, the hindered diffusivity of a large solute or the reflection coefficient of a large solute at Pe>>1. Membrane heteroporosity is incorporated in the predicted bounds without requiring one to make any a priori assumptions about the nature of the pore size distribution. in this paper, the results from calculations performed with different model membranes containing log-normal pore size distributions are reported. A comparison of the results obtained with three different membranes shows that one can distinguish between membranes with the same average pore size but different pore size distributions by measuring either the hindered diffusion coefficient or the reflection coefficient of two different sized solutes. A comparison of the bounds on D and the bounds on sigma predicted from different types of transport measurements shows that, under certain conditions, one can place tighter bounds on one transport characteristic by measuring a different one.
Keywords:ULTRAFILTRATION MEMBRANES;MICROFILTRATION MEMBRANES;ELECTRON-MICROGRAPHS;IMAGE-ANALYSIS;CURVES;BOUNDS