MASS TRANSFER

Prabal Talukdar
Associate Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
IIT Delhi
E-mail: prabal@mech.iitd.ac.in
p

Introduction
The primary driving force for fluid flow is the pressure
difference, whereas for mass transfer it is the
concentration difference.

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Examples of Mass Diffusion

Liquid-to-gas:
Liq
id to gas A gallon of gasoline left in an open
area will eventually evaporate and diffuse into air.
Solid-to-liquid: A spoon of sugar in a cup of tea will
eventuallyy dissolve and move up.
p
Solid-to gas: A moth ball left in a closet will
sublimate
bli t and
d diff
diffuse iinto
t th
the air.
i
Gas to liquid: Air dissolves in water
Gas-to-liquid:
water.
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Conduction
Fouriers law of heat conduction
Ficks
Fick
s law of diffusion
where DAB is the diffusion coefficient (or
mass diffusivity) of the species in
the mixture and CA is the concentration of
the species in the mixture at that location.
The differential equations for both heat conduction and
mass diffusion are of the same form.
Therefore, the solutions of mass diffusion equations can be obtained from the
solutions of corresponding heat conduction equations for the same type of
boundary conditions by simply switching the corresponding coefficients and
variables
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Heat Generation
Species
p
g
generation is a volumetric p
phenomenon,, and the
rate of generation may vary from point to point in the
medium. Such reactions that occur within the medium
are called homogeneous reactions and are analogous
to internal heat generation
In contrast, some chemical reactions result in the
generation of a species at the surface as a result of
chemical reactions occurring at the surface due to
contact between the medium and the surroundings.
surroundings This
is a surface phenomenon, and as such it needs to be
treated as a boundary condition
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Convection
Mass convection (or convective mass transfer) is the
mass transfer mechanism between a surface and a
moving fluid that involves both mass diffusion and bulk
fluid motion.
Fluid motion also enhances mass transfer considerably
by removing the high concentration fluid near the surface
and
d replacing
l i it b
by th
the llower concentration
t ti flfluid
id ffurther
th
away.
In mass convection, we define a concentration boundary
layer in an analogous manner to the thermal boundary
layer and define new dimensionless numbers that are
counterparts of the Nusselt and Prandtl numbers
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Mass Diffusion Equation

Consider a medium which is a binaryy mixture of two
species A and B and the medium is stationary.

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Mass flux:

n& A is the rate of increase of mass of species A per unit volume (kg-s/m3)
Rate of change
g of the mass of species
p
A within the control volume
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Same with wi (mass fraction) discussed before

In terms of molar concentration, a similar equation can be written

If DAB and are constant :

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Concentration Boundary
Layer
C = molar
l concentration,
t ti
kkmol/m
l/ 3

Molar Flux at the surface :

m/s
Molar concentration of the
mixture is constant
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Sherwood Number

Sc = /DAB

Energy:

Concentration:

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T*
x

C*A
x

+v

+v

T*
y

C*A
*

1
Re L Pr
1
Re L Sc

2 T*
*2

2C*A
*2

P.Talukdar/Mech-IITD

Lewis Number
Pr = /, Sc = /DAB

Lewis Number:

Lewis number is a measure of the relative thermal and concentration

boundary layer thicknesses. For most applications, it is reasonable to
assume a value of n = 1/3
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Heat and Mass Transfer Analogy

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Evaporative Cooling

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Boundary layer flow

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Solution

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Experimental measurement

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