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During the past few years, the importance of membranes in chemical and biotechnological applications, such as separation processes and biosensor construction, has dramatically increased. As a consequence, membrane properties have to be characterized very thoroughly with special respect to diffusivity and selectivity. Whereas most techniques for the determination of diffusion coefficients require sophisticated and often indirect methods for the detection of the analyte diffusing through the membrane, which generally do not allow monitoring of the diffusion process continuously, we present in this work an experimentally simple and straightforward method employing FTIR-ATR spectroscopy. The diffusion of glucose into a PVA membrane is chosen as a model example for the determination of carbohydrates in polymer matrices due to its special relevance in biosensor construction. The method is based on monitoring the time-dependent change in absorption due to the diffusion of the glucose into the polymer membrane. After reaching a steady-state, the normalized absorbance plot (A/A(infinity) ) versus time can be used for numerical evaluation. The diffusion coefficient is determined by comparing the experimental with simulated data using the membrane thickness (iota) and the diffusion coefficient D as simulation parameters. For this reason, the performance of a recursive and two non-recursive models for the description of the diffusion process is examined. Modifications in the second non-recursive algorithm finally resulted in very good agreement with the experimental data. This work marks the first application of IR-ATR spectroscopy for the determination of diffusion coefficients even as large as of the order of 10-6 cm2/sec.
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