Chemical Kinetics

Abstract

The thermodynamic laws discussed in Chapter 4 allow the determination of the equilibrium state of a chemical reaction system. If one assumes that the chemical reactions are fast compared to the other processes like diffusion, heat conduction, and flow, thermodynamics alone allow the description of the system locally (see, e. g., Section 13.1). In most cases, however, chemical reactions occur on time scales comparable with that of the flow and of the molecular transport processes. Therefore, information is needed about the rate of chemical reactions, i. e., the chemical kinetics. Thus, the basic laws of chemical kinetics shall be discussed in the following, which are based on macroscopic observation. The chapter will show that these macroscopic rate laws are a consequence of the underlying microscopic phenomena of collisions between molecules.