Sorption and desorption of fumigants on grains: mathematical description
1986
Banks, H.J.
For a technology as old and well established as fumigation, it is remarkable that no explicit general description has yet been developed to describe the interaction between grain and the fumigant. The interaction can be viewed at three levels: sorption-desorption behaviour for individual grains ('grain level'), transport of fumigant around a grain mass ('commodity level') and loss of fumigant to the atmosphere ('storage level'). A sound description of behaviour at the grain level is a fundamental requirement for modelling at higher levels. Fumigants are sorbed on grain either by physical forces (e.g. carbon tetrachloride) or a combination of physical and chemical forces (e.g. phosphine and methyl bromide). Sorption of some fumigants had been successfully described in terms of solutions to the diffusion equation, considering a grain as a sphere, but terms for reaction have not been included in this model. Models describing sorption in terms of quantity of different constituents (e.g. fat, protein) show promises, and progress has been made in quantifying reactions of fumigants with grain in terms of chemical kinetics
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