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Diffusion processes in multicomponent mixtures can behave in quite different way than in binary mixtures, where the General Fick's Law is valid. In multicomponent mixtures, the diffusive flux of one component could be influence not only by the concentration gradient of that component, but also, by all the other concentration gradients.
Although in many cases these effects are negligible from a practical point of view (Cussler, 1976), there are some other cases where it is important to take them into account, as in film drying processes (Pourdarvish, 2005). Some theories are available to predict all the diffusion coefficients needed to describe a multicomponent process, based on the thermodynamics of the system and the transport properties of the binary case.
Nevertheless no experimental values for those coefficients have been reported in the literature, since no experimental technique has been successfully applied to multicomponent processes. In this work, we propose using inverse gas chromatography (IGC) to experimentally determine those diffusion coefficients.
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