Sorption mechanism and prediction of sorbents' behaviour in physicochemical systems

The possibility of quantitative and semiquantitative prediction of sorbents' behaviour in various physicochemical systems is discussed. The attention is primarily devoted to the investigation of elementary processes at different surface areas of a sorbent grain. It is noted that the achieved level of the description of sorption processes based on semiquantitative estimations provides sufficient information to predict sorption kinetics and equilibrium a posteriori. The possibility of sorption by both a separate sorbent grain and grain agglomerates is analysed. The peculiarities of sorption processes on biosorbents are considered. Steps in the search for an optimum sorbent for a given system are described. The bibliography includes 242 references.