Direct measurement of intraparticle fluid velocity in superporous agarose beads.

Superporous agarose beads contain both normal diffusion pores and special, very wide superpores through which part of the chromatographic flow is transported, a situation that may greatly improve the chromatographic performance. For the first time such pore flow was measured directly by following the movement of microparticles (dyed yeast cells) through superporous beads packed in a chromatographic bed. The passage of the microparticles through the superpores and through the interstitial pores was recorded by a microscope/video camera. The video recordings were subsequently used to determine flow paths as well as the convective fluid velocities in both the superpores and the interstitial pores. The superpore fluid velocity was found to be proportional to the ratio between the squares of the respective pore diameters, which is in agreement with the Kozeny-Carman equation. Values for two-dimensional and three-dimensional tortuosity of the flow paths were measured and calculated respectively.