Surface exclusion effects in adsorption processes

Abstract

Most of the adsorption experiments of proteins on solid surfaces are interpreted with the Langmuir kinetic equation. We show that this equation does not accurately describe the surface exclusion effect. We propose improvements in two limiting cases; (i) the particles, once adsorbed, can diffuse rapidly on the surface; (ii) the particles can neither diffuse on the surface, nor desorb from it; the so called random sequential adsorption (RSA) model. In the last case, we compare our results with computer simulations.