Transient transport in reactive barrier membranes.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

By adding chemical scavengers to a membrane, we can increase the lag time of the membrane by over two orders of magnitude. We demonstrate this experimentally in multiple systems with various applications. This improvement in lag time can be analytically derived by multiple pathways, and has been shown to be independent of the rate at which the solute is scavenged. The amount of solute which crosses the film prior to steady-state does change with reaction rate, however, and can strongly impact the suitability of the membrane. Poly(vinyl alcohol) membranes containing ZnO of various particle sizes were used to demonstrate this phenomenon during acid breakthrough. We have defined two parameters to quantify this transient solute transfer: the ‘leakage’ and the ‘kill time’. We constructed computer models which simulate solute breakthrough and used them to correlate the leakage and the kill time to known physical parameters of the system. These correlations appear to be robust, applying equally well to systems with different kinetic expressions. Finally, we look at two extensions from this work: Transient transport through layered membranes and dissolution-controlled drug delivery.