Abstract
SOME striking results on the rates of adsorption of nitrogen on tungsten have recently been obtained by a flash filament technique1. The rate of adsorption is expressed in terms of a ‘sticking factor’, s, the probability that a molecule striking the surface shall remain there. It is found that the sticking factor at 300° K. remains constant independent of surface coverage, θ, until there is about one nitrogen atom for every four tungsten atoms. As the temperature is increased by steps to 1,100° K., s both decreases for any given θ and also starts to fall off at lower surface coverages. It would seem that the decrease of s with rising temperature would not be expected from the usual picture of activated adsorption. Furthermore, although the decrease of rate with increasing θ may be influenced by repulsive forces between the adsorbed atoms, the decrease might be supposed to take place at a fixed θ, that is, at a certain distance between adsorbed atoms, and not to change with temperature as was found. Similar behaviour has been observed earlier for adsorption on catalysts, namely, a constant rapid rate of adsorption extending up to high surface coverages followed by a swift decrease as saturation is reached. A rate proportional to exp(−aθ) has been proposed2.
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References
Becker, J. A., and Hartman, C. D., J. Phys. Chem., 57, 153 (1953).
Zeldowitsch, J., Acta Physicochimica U.S.S.R., 1, 449 (1934).
Langmuir, I., J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 54, 2798 (1932).
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PATTERSON, D. Effect of Surface Diffusion on Rates of Adsorption. Nature 173, 1184–1185 (1954). https://doi.org/10.1038/1731184a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1731184a0
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