Computer evaluation of water sorption on ion exchangers.

Water sorption on an ion exchanger can be described by formation of several hydrates. The general least squares program WSLET based on the "pit-mapping" approach has been written for evaluating such equilibria. It is written in FORTRAN 77 for use on personal computers. Besides finding the best values for the equilibrium constants of the various hydrates the program also searches for best values of the stoichiometric indices by using the so-called ESI-method. The program is provided with least-squares procedures and blocks for statistical analysis of the residuals as well as for data simulation. It has been tested with data on the strong base resin Dowex 1 as well as on simulated data. In the present paper an illustrative example is given together with data simulation. It is found that in most cases WSLET helps to find a better fit than earlier models quite efficiently, showing the advantage of the ESI method in combination with least-squares methods.