2013/01/02 by Quevedo, Hernando, Tapias, Diego
#Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #Differential Geometry (math.DG) #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1301.0262
We use the formalism of Geometrothermodynamics to describe chemical reactions in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics. Any chemical reaction in a closed system is shown to be described by a geodesic in a 2-dimensional manifold that can be interpreted as the equilibrium space of the reaction. We first show this in the particular cases of a reaction with only two species corresponding to either two ideal gases or two van der Waals gases. We then consider the case of a reaction with an arbitrary number of species. The initial equilibrium state of the geodesic is determined by the initial conditions of the reaction. The final equilibrium state, which follows from a thermodynamic analysis of the reaction, is shown to correspond to a coordinate singularity of the thermodynamic metric which describes the equilibrium manifold.