Thermodynamics "beyond" local equilibrium

Details Thermodynamics "beyond" local equilibrium Thermodynamics "beyond" local equilibrium

2001-10-30

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0110614v1

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98, 11081-11084 (2001)

Physics

Condensed Matter

11 pages, 1 figure

Scientific paper

10.1073/pnas.191360398

Nonequilibrium thermodynamics has shown its applicability in a wide variety of different situations pertaining to fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. As successful as it is, however, its current formulation considers only systems close to equilibrium --those satisfying the so-called local equilibrium hypothesis. Here we show that diffusion processes that occur far away from equilibrium can be viewed as at local equilibrium in a space that includes all the relevant variables in addition to the spatial coordinate. In this way, nonequilibrium thermodynamics can be used and the difficulties and ambiguities associated with the lack of a thermodynamic description disappear. We analyze explicitly the inertial effects in diffusion and outline how the main ideas can be applied to other situations.

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