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Basic physical chemistry : a complete introduction on bachelor of science level
- Date_TXT
- UK: Booknoon, 2014
- Auteur
- Peter Dybdahl Hede
- Type de document
- Livre
Description :
What is Physical Chemistry? Simply spoken, it is a scientific branch located between Physics and Chemistry. By using the principles of physics and mathematics to obtain quantitative relations, physical chemistry deals with the structure and dynamics of matter. These relations are, in most cases, either concerned with phase and chemical equilibrium, or dynamic processes such as phase transitions, reaction kinetics, charge transport, and energy exchange between systems and surroundings.
To describe a physical chemical system and its dynamics or evolution towards an equilibrium state, only a limited set of variables of state is needed: volume, temperature, pressure and amount of material. The equilibrium state itself is based on the simple principle of minimizing the free enthalpy of the system. Free enthalpy is thus one of the most important concepts in physical chemistry. The change of free enthalpy is based on the change of two fundamental quantities: enthalpy which provides a measure for the energy of the system, and entropy which, qualitatively, characterizes the state of order of our system. Before going into too much detail here, let me stress one point to be kept in mind during the study of this book: physical chemistry is based on a small number of fundamental quantities and general physical concepts, which once fully understood by a student, it should be quite easy to pass an examination in physical chemistry without the need to explicitly learn a lot of detailed equations.
This book, which tries to provide a complete overview of physical chemistry on the level of a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry, is organized as following:
I already mentioned that physical chemistry deals with the quantitative description of chemical phenomena. Consequently, it affords some knowledge in mathematics. In Chapter 1, I try to briefly introduce all the mathematical concepts needed to understand the formalisms as well as the example problems presented in subsequent other chapters.