Abstract

Engineering phenomena occur in open systems undergoing irreversible, nonequilibrium processes for coupled mass, energy, and momentum transport. The momentum transport often becomes a primary or background process, on which driving forces of physical gradients govern mass and heat transfer rates. Although in the steady state no physical variables have explicit variation with time, entropy increases with time as long as the systems are open. The degree of irreversibility can be measured by the entropy-increasing rate, first proposed by L. Onsager. This book conceptually reorganizes the entropy and its rate in broader aspects. Diffusion is fully described as an irreversible, i.e., entropy increasing, phenomenon using four different physical pictures. Finally, an irreversible thermodynamic formalism using effective driving forces is established as an extension to the Onsager's reciprocal theorem, which was applied to core engineering phenomena of fundamental importance: solute diffusion and thermal flux. In addition, the osmotic and thermal fluxes are explained in the unified theoretical framework.

Keywords: irreversible thermodynamics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, Onsager's reciprocal theorem, entropy rate, diffusion pictures, irreversible transport equation
