After internal discussions, @ronald.jaepel and I decided that this behavior will be deprecated in CADET-Process v0.8.0 which will be released shortly.
We understand that this introduces a breaking change which is not ideal, but we believe that keeping consistency with CADET-Core is more important at this point.
I am still personally of the opinion that the way the parameters are handled in CADET-Core is not ideal. As a user, I want to be able to change the reference concentration (i.e. numerical “hack”) independently from the value of the adsorption isotherm (thermodynamic information) s.t. parameters can be transferred from one model to another.
Ideally, this would even be automated by CADET-Core, e.g. with a flag (normalize_concentration). But that’s an issue for future discussions!
In summary, from CADET-Process v0.8.0 onward, adsorption_rate and desorption_rate in the SMA model (and similar models) will directly map to ka/kd of CADET-Core and consequently correspond to the transformed parameters. Should you want to use the “real” parameter values (e.g. when transferring parameters), you can get and set adsorption_rate_untransformed and desorption_rate_untransformed respectively from the CADET-Process binding model classes’ attributes.
Thanks to @ronald.jaepel for implementation and testing.
If you have any more questions, please let us know!
Once again, we’re sorry for any inconveniences this might have caused.