Chemical Potential or Partial Molal Gibbs Energy

Abstract

The chapter concerns the definition of the chemical potential as being a partial molar Gibbs energy. It also mentions its physical meaning, some of its properties with, especially, its change accompanying a chemical transformation. The chemical potential is, by far for our purpose, the most important partial molal quantity. As we shall see it later, the value of the chemical potential of a species is, indeed, very often expressed in terms of the auxiliary functions that are the fugacity and the activity. The notion of chemical potential, notably, permits the study of the change in the Gibbs energy accompanying a chemical process and is the thermodynamic basis of the so-called mass action law.