New and general framework for adsorption processes on dynamic interfaces

Abstract

We introduce a new and general continuum thermodynamic framework for the mathematical analysis and computation of adsorption on dynamic interfaces. To the best of our knowledge, there is no formulation available that accounts for the coupled dynamics of interfaces and densities of adsorbants. Our framework leads to analytic adsorption isotherms which also take the interfacial geometry fully into account. We demonstrate the utility and physical consistency of our framework with a new computational multi-level discretization strategy. In the computations, we recover the experimentally observed feature that the adsorption of particles minimizes the interfacial tension.