Study of helium permeability for silica microspheres

This paper presents the study of permeability of helium through walls of hollow glass silica microspheres, which can be used as membranes for gas flow. The study was performed in a special setup for measuring the kinetic sorption curves for helium at given pressure and temperature. A mathematical model based on a mono-dispersion distribution was used for approximating the experimental data. The data was obtained for the temperature range 21.5–110.0 °C. The helium permeability of microsphere walls and the activation energy for helium sorption by microspheres were defined for this temperature range.