Analysis of the drying stage in the technology of supported catalysts

The distribution of the precipitated active component has been analyzed using the concepts of moisture transfer mechanism for the evaporation of porous materials. Formulas are proposed for the low-dispersity phase, depending on the precipitation parameter. The calculations performed using a statistical porous environment model are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data.

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Some methods of calculating the steady motion of a rarefied gas

Vacuum molecular pumps have been long known and have several advantages [1–3].Several studies have been devoted to the design of vacuum molecular pumps [7–10]. The methods developed in these studies have been based either on the formulas for gas diffusion in long pipes or on the integral equations of material balance. However, these theories do not permit obtaining design data for real designs of molecular pumps which are close to the experimental data, and, moreover, do not permit solving the practically important problem of optimizing the parameters and geometry of the molecular and turbomolecular pumps with respect to output and compression ratio. The calculations made in [8–10] are valid only for rotor speeds which are much less than the average velocities of the gas molecules. However, the studies in the second direction cannot be continued to a final result in view of the extreme complexity of the solution of the resulting system of integral equations.In the following we describe the calculation of vacuum molecular pumps, based on the Monte-Carlo method (the Monte-Carlo method has been used to calculate the conductance of the elements of vacuum lines in the free molecular regime in [4, 5, 6] and to calculate using the method of sequential approximations the flow of a rarefied gas with account for the collisions between molecules in [11]).We shall apply this method not only to systems with a high vacuum, when the collisions between molecules may be neglected, but also to systems in which in addition to the molecule collisions with the wall it is necessary to consider the possibility of a small number of mutual collisions.     

Calculation of chemical potentials of chain molecules by the incremental gauge cell method

The gauge cell Monte Carlo method is extended to calculations of the incremental chemical potentials and free energies of linear chain molecules. The method was applied to chains of Lennard-Jones beads with stiff harmonic bonds up to 500 monomers in length. We show that the suggested method quantitatively reproduces the modified Widom particle insertion method of Kumar et al. [S. K. Kumar, I. Szleifer, and A. Z. Panagiotopoulos, Phys. Rev. Lett. 66(22), 2935 (1991)], and is by an order of magnitude more efficient for long chains in terms of the computational time required for the same accuracy of chemical potential calculations. The chain increment ansatz, which suggests that the incremental chemical potential is independent of the chain length, was tested at different temperatures. We confirmed that the ansatz holds only for coils above the θ temperature. Special attention is paid to the effects of the magnitude of adsorption potential and temperature on the behavior of single chains in confinements that are comparable in size with the free chain radius of gyration. At sufficiently low temperatures, the dependence of the incremental chemical potential on the chain length in wetting pores is superficially similar to a capillary condensation isotherm, reflecting monolayer formation following by pore volume filling, as the chain length increases. We find that the incremental gauge cell method is an accurate and efficient technique for calculations of the free energies of chain molecules in bulk systems and nanoconfinements alike. The suggested method may find practical applications, such as modeling polymer partitioning on porous substrates and dynamics of chain translocation into nanopores.     

Absorption and transport properties of ultra-fine cellulose webs

Characterization of transport and absorption properties of nanofiber webs is a challenge, because in many cases the material is soft and cannot withstand the stresses exerted by the standard instruments. In this paper, we report on development of a new technique for materials characterization. We propose to conduct wicking and permeability experiments for full characterization of the nanowebs. As an example, we used electrospun cellulose acetate nanowebs. The wicking experiments showed very good reproducibility, demonstrating the square-root-of-time dependence of wetting front position vs time. The prefactor depends on a product of capillary pressure and materials permeability. We developed a technique to independently measure the permeability of small samples of nanowebs. Wicking and permeability data allow one to estimate the pore size; SEM micrographs confirmed the obtained estimates of pore radius. In general, the proposed method allows one to characterize the transport and absorption parameters of the nanofibrous materials for which the standard procedures are inapplicable.