raw · papers · ingested 2026-06-26
Disentangling Adsorption and Absorption in Microporous Polymers
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12464648/
Source: PMC12464648 (peer-reviewed, 2025). Full text was captcha-gated; summary from the abstract. Credibility: High (peer-reviewed). Confidence: medium-high (abstract-level).
Key points
- Physical difference, sharpened: adsorption = nanopore filling, governed by pore structure and surface functionalization; absorption = polymer plasticization/swelling, governed by the bulk matrix chemistry.
- Why the line blurs experimentally: because both processes increase the sorbent’s mass, ordinary gravimetric and volumetric uptake measurements cannot separate them — a core reason adsorption and absorption are conflated even in the lab.
- The discriminating method: in-situ spectroscopic ellipsometry with optical modeling resolves film-thickness change (swelling → absorption) separately from optical-density change (pore filling → adsorption).
Relevance
Supplies the rigorous “how do you actually tell them apart, and why is it hard” content for the adsorption-vs-absorption concept article: the surface-vs-bulk definition is clean, but distinguishing them operationally when both coexist needs more than a mass measurement.