Investigating Sorbent Geometry Response Surfaces from Sorption Rate Data

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Sorption and desorption of hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs) into soil particles occurs at Air Force contamination sites. Long-term desorption extends clean up time, costing billions. Accurately modeling desorption will reduce costs and improve clean up designs. State of the art models depict soil as uniform spherical particles which lose the effect of longer sorption path lengths. An alternate approach, the multiple sites in series (MSS) model, describes the sorption capacity of a mixture of soil particle sizes and shapes using a composite particle defined by a two parameter statistical distribution. When the MSS model uses a general radial geometry function as the statistical distribution, unique parameters can not be fit to laboratory experimental data. This research employs response surface methodology (RSM) to investigate the nonunique parameter model deficiency. Analysis shows that the response surface for the general radial geometry function is a trough with no unique minimum. A unique minimum is found when the statistical distribution is changed to a gamma distribution.