SUMMARY Adsorption is a process in which atoms, ions, or molecules of gas, liquid or dissolved solid attach to a surface.

This process will create a film of adsorbate on the surface of the adsorbent. It differs from absorption, in which a fluid is dissolved by a liquid or solid. The term sorption explain both processes, while desorption is the reverse of adsorption. It is a surface phenomenon which is similar to surface tension. In a bulk material, all the bonding requirements such as ionic and covalent are filled by other atoms in the material. However, atoms on the surface of the adsorbent are not completely surrounded by other adsorbent atoms and therefore can attract adsorbates. The exact nature of the bonding depends on the details of the species involved, but the adsorption process is generally classified as physisorption (characteristic of weak van der Waals forces) or chemisorption (characteristic of covalent bonding). It may also occur due to electrostatic attraction. Adsorption is present in many natural physical, biological, and chemical systems, and is widely used in industrial applications such as activated charcoal, capturing and using waste heat to provide cold water for air conditioning and other process requirements (adsorption chillers), synthetic resins, increase storage capacity of carbide-derived carbons for tunable nanoporous carbon, and water purification. Adsorption, ion exchange, and chromatography are sorption processes in which certain adsorbates are selectively transferred from the fluid phase to the surface of insoluble, rigid particles suspended in a vessel or packed in a column.

INTRODUCTION As gas or vapor is brought into contact with a solid, part of it is taken up by the solid. The molecules that disappear from the gas either enter the inside of the solid, or remain on the outside attached to the surface. The former phenomenon is termed absorption (or dissolution) and the latter adsorption. When the phenomena occur simultaneously, the process is termed sorption. The phenomenon of adsorption was discovered over two centuries ago. The uptake of gases by charcoal was studied by C. W. Scheele in 1773 and by the F. Fontana in 1777. In 1785, charcoal was found to decolorize' solutions by a surface adsorption mechanism. The solid that takes up the gas is called the adsorbent, and the gas or vapor taken up on the surface is called the adsorbate. The gas adsorption can be used to determine the accessible surface area of most absorbents. It can provide a convenient, cheap and reusable method for fluid purification and purification. Gas masks used nowadays are an example of the utility of charcoal as an absorbent. Moreover, the phenomenon of surface adsorption has been used to modify the rates of product yields of chemical reactions through heterogeneous catalysis. For a catalyst to be useful, it must have a large surface area, bind the reactants quickly and effectively, stabilize the activated complex, and release the products of the reaction. Thus the attraction of various molecules on the surface and the total surface area of the catalyst, are the most important properties of potential catalytic materials. Gas adsorption has been studied theoretically for most of this century and the simplest of the resulting theories provide the insight needed for most applications.

http://www.chem.ufl.edu/~itl/4411L_f00/ads/ads_1.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption