Encyclopedia > Thermodynamic potentials

  Article Content

Thermodynamic potentials

Thermodynamic potentials are quantities which appear in thermodynamics. They are measured in units of energy, and there are four of them:

where T = temperature, S = entropy, p = pressure, V = volume

Chemical reactions

Changes in these quantities are useful for assessing the degree to which a chemical reaction will proceed. The relevant quantity depends on the reaction conditions, as shown in the following table. (NB "Δ" denotes the change in a quantity.)

 Constant VConstant p
Constant SΔUΔH
Constant TΔFΔG

Most commonly one considers reactions at constant p and T, so the Gibbs free energy is the most useful potential in studies of chemical reactions.

External link



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Monty Woolley

... a professor and lecturer at Yale University (one of his students was Thornton Wilder) who began acting on Broadway in 1936. He was typecast as the wasp-tongued, ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 37.3 ms