The phenomenon of surface transport has become widely recognized as a significant contributor to dynamic intraparticle mass transfer during adsorption. The object of this paper is tc demonstrate and explain the occurrence of a dual breakthrough phenomenon for single-component adsorption, which had been observed by Cagliostro et al. (1985), in terms of a moving-boundary model for the rapid transport of an adsorbed vapor. The occurrence of this dual breakthrough phenomenon is shown to permit the separation of surface and volume diffusivities, which has not previously been possible (Riekert, 1985).The surface flux of lighter gases has been characterized by surface hopping models and spreading pressure models (Okazaki et al., 1981), but the dynamics of adsorption of condensable vapors have been little characterized to date. Flood et al. (1952) found that surface transport of strongly adsorbed organic vapors was highest for the lowest partial pressures of the adsorbate, corresponding to the steepest region of their adsorption isotherm, and attributed this to a greater thermodynamic driving force for surface spreading. Flood termed the adsorbed vapor surface transport "anomalous." In more recent work, Thackur and Brown (1983) have indicated that a transition between the two types of surface fluid transport occurs with an increase in momentum transfer from the gas to the adsorbed fluid, and between fluid layers. The initial adsorption of mobile chemisorbed films has been suggested (Illinger and Rivin, 1970), so the assumption of physisorption is not necessary. This paper considers two models for adsorption. The first, the moving-boundary model (MBM), considers transport of an organic vapor on activated carbon using an expression for the rate of surface spreading derived by Gilliland and Russell Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to W. L. Klotzwhere n, is the adsorbed layer flow rate (kmol/s), P is the vapor pressure of the spreading film (kPa), I, is a spatial coordinate (m) along the solid surface that incorporates the tortuosity factor k (dimensionless), A, is the cross-sectional area of the porous material (m'), S, is the specific surface over which adsorbed molecules are mobile (m2/kg), x is the surface concentration of the film at 1, (kmol/kg adsorbent), p, is the apparent density of the solid (kg/m3), R is the appropriate ideal gas constant, T is the absolute temperature (K), and C, is Gilliland's coefficient of flow resistance. In dimensionless terms, this equation takes the form:where up is the surface concentration and qs is the dimensionless spreading flux, alg is a constant, and yP+ is the equilibrium concentration in a pore for a given surface concentration up, as determined by the isotherm, and ( , is the spatial coordinate for the normal direction of spreading. The definitions of these and other dimensionless terms are given in Table 1 . The second model, the pore-volume diffusion model (PVDM) is more conventional with a pore diffusion transport term for gas adsorption in macropor...