The impact of ‘non-rainfall’ water on soil is important in arid zones. In that environment, the amount of dew can exceed that of rainfall, or even be the sole source of liquid water for plants. However, since plants cover only a small fraction of the desert surface, such assessments apply only to a small proportion of the area. In the absence of fog, dew formation and direct water vapor adsorpt...

Introduction: Phoenix has shown that there exists vapor pressure variations on a diurnal time scale, which are not predicted by the GCM [1]. Recorded vapor pressures by the TECP shows systematic variations by about 2 orders of magnitude (Fig. 1) [2]. Since the GCM model does not take into account atmospheric interactions with the regolith, we may infer that the shortcomings of this model in thi...

Vapor adsorption is an important process influencing the migration and the fates of many organic pollutants in the environment. In this study, adsorption of ethylene glycol (EG) vapor onto single crystal alpha-Al2O3 (0001) and fused SiO2 (amorphous) surfaces was studied with sum frequency generation spectroscopy, a well-suited surface specific technique for probing interfacial phenomena atthe m...

An artificial neural network study of gas drying by adsorption in fixed bed of composite materials is presented in this paper. The experimental investigations were carried out at two values of relative humidity and three values of air flow rate respectively. The experimental data were employed in the design of the feed forward neural networks for modeling the evolution in time of some adsorptio...

There is evidence to suggest that the gas-water interface serves as an important retention domain for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in vadose-zone soil. Moreover, vapor adsorption at the gas-water interface may represent the dominant retention mechanism under certain conditions. In general, vapor-phase interfacial adsorption is most significant for low organic matter soils at intermediate w...

An apparatus has been designed and built to measure the adsorption of contaminants on the surfaces of lubricated carbon overcoats such as those used on magnetic data storage media. The device is based on a quartz crystal microbalance housed in a high vacuum chamber and can be used to make rapid measurements of both the amounts and the rates of contaminant adsorption from the gas phase during ex...

Water adsorption is becoming increasingly important for many applications including thermal energy storage, desalination, and water harvesting. To develop such applications, it is essential to understand both adsorbent-adsorbate and adsorbate-adsorbate interactions, and also the energy required for adsorption/desorption processes of porous material-adsorbate systems, such as zeolites and metal-...