• DOI:10.1007/s10910-013-0250-8
• Corpus ID: 98584924

Geometric description of chemical reactions

@article{Quevedo2013GeometricDO,
  title={Geometric description of chemical reactions},
  author={Hernando Quevedo and Diego Tapias},
  journal={Journal of Mathematical Chemistry},
  year={2013},
  volume={52},
  pages={141-161}
}

• H. Quevedo, D. Tapias
• Published 2 January 2013
• Physics
• Journal of Mathematical Chemistry

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.