Analytical study of type-1 facilitated transport through liquid surfactant membrane

In the present study, a mass transfer model for Type-1 facilitated transport in liquid surfactant membrane is developed by taking into consideration a size distribution of emulsion drops, and analytical solution of the model equations has been presented. The model takes into account the continuous phase and outer liquid membrane phase resistances along with diffusion through composite emulsion drop. Effort has been made to highlight the effect of the various system parameters on the extraction rate including computation of reaction front position. The results of this work are found to be in good agreement with the published experimental results on batch extraction of phenol using NaOH as internal reagent. The model would thus provide an insight of the separation mechanism involved in the mass transfer processes in this type of system.