Part I of this study presents a theoretical method combined with experiments to determine the adsorption kinetics of powdered activated carbon (PAC) in the hybrid PAC-submerged membrane (SM) system with air bubbling for trace organics removal. The homogeneous surface diffusion model (HSDM) was applied to describe the kinetics of the adsorbate uptake. The differences between the model solutions and the corresponding experimental results were minimized by means of Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm so that two kinetic parameters D-S and k(f) involved in HSDM were obtained simultaneously. The D-S was found to be 1.14 x 10(-16) m(2)/s and the k(f) value was correlated with the bubbling rate (Q(b)) and carbon dosage (C-c), which are required in the modeling of the hybrid PAC-SM system presented in Part II of this study. The kf was enhanced from 1.18 x 10(-4) to 4.18 x 10(-4) m/s when the bubbling intensity increased in the intermittent bubbling tests, suggesting that from energy consumption point of view, the high intensity intermittent bubbling is more efficient in improving the liquid film mass transfer than continuous bubbling with the same net bubbling rate. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.