A MATHEMATICAL METHOD FOR EVALUATION OF ADSORPTION ANALYSIS

Adsorption analysis is a method for describing an overall isotherm of a mixture of unknown composition such as natural organic substances or chemical industries wastewater by dividing into fictive components of different adsorbability. The adsorption behaviour of the fictive components is characterized by using the Freundlich isotherm. The competitive adsorption between these components is described by the Ideal Adsorbed Solution Theory (IAST). Usually, at given Freundlich parameters K and n, the initial concentrations of the fictive components must be adjusted in order to obtain a good fit between calculated and measured isotherm data points. The results of this adjustment depend to some extent on the minimization criteria. Previously, the modeling was done with empirical or numerical methods which required a lot of computation time and sometimes caused numerical problems which made the interpretation of the results difficult. This paper describes a mathematical method for the evaluation of isotherms by adsorption analysis.