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Mass transfer in a system is governed by Fick's first law: 'Diffusion flux from higher concentration to lower concentration is proportional to the gradient of the concentration of the substance and the diffusivity of the substance in the medium.' Mass transfer can take place due to different driving forces. Some of them are: [12]
Mass transfer is the net movement of mass from one location (usually meaning stream, phase, fraction, or component) to another. Mass transfer occurs in many processes, such as absorption, evaporation, drying, precipitation, membrane filtration, and distillation. Mass transfer is used by different scientific disciplines for different processes ...
The same restrictions described in the heat transfer definition are applied to the mass transfer definition. The Sherwood number can be used to find an overall mass transfer coefficient and applied to Fick's law of diffusion to find concentration profiles and mass transfer fluxes.
The basic mechanisms and mathematics of heat, mass, and momentum transport are essentially the same. Among many analogies (like Reynolds analogy, Prandtl–Taylor analogy) developed to directly relate heat transfer coefficients, mass transfer coefficients and friction factors, Chilton and Colburn J-factor analogy proved to be the most accurate.
The Sherwood number (Sh) (also called the mass transfer Nusselt number) is a dimensionless number used in mass-transfer operation. It represents the ratio of the total mass transfer rate (convection + diffusion) to the rate of diffusive mass transport, [1] and is named in honor of Thomas Kilgore Sherwood. It is defined as follows
In mass transfer, the sieving coefficient is a measure of equilibration between the concentrations of two mass transfer streams. It is defined as the mean pre- and post-contact concentration of the mass receiving stream divided by the pre- and post-contact concentration of the mass donating stream. = where
D is the mass diffusivity, λ is the thermal conductivity, ρ is the density, D im is the mixture-averaged diffusion coefficient, c p is the specific heat capacity at constant pressure. In the field of fluid mechanics, many sources define the Lewis number to be the inverse of the above definition. [3] [4]
In the context of species or mass transfer, the Péclet number is the product of the Reynolds number and the Schmidt number (Re × Sc). In the context of the thermal fluids, the thermal Péclet number is equivalent to the product of the Reynolds number and the Prandtl number (Re × Pr). The Péclet number is defined as: