English

Geometric description of chemical reactions

Mathematical Physics 2013-01-03 v1 Differential Geometry math.MP Chemical Physics

Abstract

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 22-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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1301.0262,
  title  = {Geometric description of chemical reactions},
  author = {Hernando Quevedo and Diego Tapias},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.0262},
  year   = {2013}
}