Determination of the energetic topography of bivariate heterogeneous surfaces from adsorption isotherms

Abstract

The reversible adsorption process occurring on patchwise heterogeneous bivariate surfaces is studied by Monte Carlo simulation and mean-field approximation. These surfaces are characterized by a collection of deep and shallow adsorbing patches with a typical length scale l. Patches can be either arranged in a deterministic chessboard structure or in a random way. Previous studies showed that the topography of a given surface can be obtained from the knowledge of the corresponding adsorption isotherm and a reference curve. In the present work, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using different reference curves. One of the main consequences of this analysis is to provide an improved method for the determination of the energetic topography of the surface from adsorption measurements.