Search results for "Chemical clock"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
The heat of transfer in a chemical reaction at equilibrium.
2007
International audience; We study a reacting mixture (2F $ F2) in a temperature gradient. We had previously used boundary-driven non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations to study this system, and found that the reaction was close to local chemical equilibrium in temperature gradients up to 1012 K/m. Using the condition of local chemical equilibrium, we show that the heat of transfer of the reacting mixture is equal to minus the enthalpy of the reaction. The fact that the sign of the heat of transfer is determined by the type of reaction adds insight to the discussion of the origin of the sign
The Boltzmann Probability as a Unifying Approach to Different Phenomena
2010
We discuss a pedagogical approach to the role of the Boltzmann probability in describing the temperature dependence of three simple experimental situations. The approach has been experimented in an introductory course on statistical mechanics for undergraduate engineering students at University of Palermo.
Ortho-H2 and the age of prestellar cores
2013
Prestellar cores form from the contraction of cold gas and dust material in dark clouds before they collapse to form protostars. Several concurrent theories exist to describe this contraction but they are currently difficult to distinguish. One major difference is the timescale involved in forming the prestellar cores: some theories advocate nearly free-fall speed via, e.g., rapid turbulence decay, while others can accommodate much longer periods to let the gas accumulate via, e.g., ambipolar diffusion. To tell the difference between these theories, measuring the age of prestellar cores could greatly help. However, no reliable clock currently exists. We present a simple chemical clock based…