Fick's laws of diffusion
Fick's laws of diffusion
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Fick's laws of diffusion

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Fick's laws of diffusion

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Fick's laws of diffusion

Fick's laws of diffusion describe diffusion and were first posited by Adolf Fick in 1855 on the basis of largely experimental results. They can be used to solve for the diffusion coefficient, D. Fick's first law can be used to derive his second law which in turn is identical to the diffusion equation.

Fick's first law: Movement of particles from high to low concentration (diffusive flux) is directly proportional to the particle's concentration gradient.

Fick's second law: Prediction of change in concentration gradient with time due to diffusion.

A diffusion process that obeys Fick's laws is called normal or Fickian diffusion; otherwise, it is called anomalous diffusion or non-Fickian diffusion.

In 1855, physiologist Adolf Fick first reported his now well-known laws governing the transport of mass through diffusive means. Fick's work was inspired by the earlier experiments of Thomas Graham, which fell short of proposing the fundamental laws for which Fick would become famous. Fick's law is analogous to the relationships discovered at the same epoch by other eminent scientists: Darcy's law (hydraulic flow), Ohm's law (charge transport), and Fourier's law (heat transport).

Fick's experiments (modeled on Graham's) dealt with measuring the concentrations and fluxes of salt, diffusing between two reservoirs through tubes of water. It is notable that Fick's work primarily concerned diffusion in fluids, because at the time, diffusion in solids was not considered generally possible. Today, Fick's laws form the core of our understanding of diffusion in solids, liquids, and gases (in the absence of bulk fluid motion in the latter two cases). When a diffusion process does not follow Fick's laws (which happens in cases of diffusion through porous media and diffusion of swelling penetrants, among others), it is referred to as non-Fickian.

Fick's first law relates the diffusive flux to the gradient of the concentration. It postulates that the flux goes from regions of high concentration to regions of low concentration, with a magnitude that is proportional to the concentration gradient (spatial derivative), or in simplistic terms the concept that a solute will move from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration across a concentration gradient. In one (spatial) dimension, the law can be written in various forms, where the most common form (see) is in a molar basis: where

D is proportional to the squared velocity of the diffusing particles, which depends on the temperature, viscosity of the fluid and the size of the particles according to the Stokes–Einstein relation. The modeling and prediction of Fick's diffusion coefficients is difficult. They can be estimated using the empirical Vignes correlation model or the physically-motivated entropy scaling. In dilute aqueous solutions the diffusion coefficients of most ions are similar and have values that at room temperature are in the range of (0.6–2)×10−9 m2/s. For biological molecules the diffusion coefficients normally range from 10−10 to 10−11 m2/s.

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