Diffusion Fundamentals (E-Journal)
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Estimation of line tension of individual dislocations from the thermal motion trajectories of inclusions attached to them
Concentration dependent diffusivities of model solvents in heavy oil
The rates of dissolution of heavy crude oil in liquid solvents and rates of desorption of solvents from oil have been measured. The crude oil used is a non-volatile heavy oil of 4253 mPa.s viscosity at room temperature. The solvents used are hexane, heptane and toluene. When the oil (black) is contacted with a solvent (transparent) an interface is seen which moves with time and takes a very long time to become fuzzy. The rate of movementof the front is measured. The dissolution experiments give very consistent results, but there are two parameters involved, Do, the diffusivity at infinite dilution and alpha which determines the concentration dependence. As a result it is necessary to do desorption experiments to be able to calculate both constants from the rate of movement of the front data. However, desorption experiments could not be performed under conditions of low concentrations suitable for the present case because of the very viscous nature of the oil. As a result, although the desorption experiments also showed good results, they could not be used to obtain good values of the parameters. When Stokes-Einstein equation was used to calculate Do, excellent results were obtained with alpha ~ 10 for the dissolution experiments and good deal smaller for the desorption experiments. That result is used to conclude that the above form for concentration dependent diffusivity is correct and concentration dependence is very high at low solvent concentrations explaining the sharp interfaces during dissolution.Other evidences have also been offered
Curvature effects on a simplified reaction-diffusion model of biodegradation
The biodegradation process of some types of polymers occurs due to many different factors including their morphology, structure and chemical composition. Although this is a complicated process, most of its important stages like the diffusion of monomers and the hydrolysis reactions have been modeled phenomenologically through reaction-diffusion equations, where the properties of the polymers were encompassed. Using a simplified reaction-diffusion model for the biodegradation of polymers, in this contribution we study the possible effects of the curvature of the system’s geometry in the degradation process, which is characterized by the interaction of the corresponding reaction rate and the diffusion coefficient. To illustrate the problem of diffusion on a curved surface we consider the surface of a cylinder and of the so-called Gaussian bump. We show how the degradation process is affected by the curvature of the system for the simplified model