Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics

Natural phenomena consist of simultaneously occurring transport processes and chemical reactions. These processes may interact with each other and may lead to self-organized structures, fluctuations, instabilities, and evolutionary systems. Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, Fourth Edition emphasizes the unifying role of thermodynamics in analyzing the natural phenomena.

This edition updates and expands the previous chapters in the third edition by focusing on the general balance equations for coupled processes of physical, chemical, and biological systems. The updates expansions includes stochastic approaches, self-organization criticality, ecosystems, mesoscopic thermodynamics, constructal law, quantum thermodynamics, fluctuation theory, information theory, and modeling the coupled biochemical systems. The new edition emphasizes nonequilibrium thermodynamics tools, such as fluctuation theories, mesoscopic thermodynamic analysis, information theories, and quantum thermodynamics in describing and designing small scale systems. This new addition also come with more examples and practice problems.

• Provides a useful text for seniors and graduate students from diverse engineering and science programs
• Highlights the fundamentals of equilibrium thermodynamics, transport processes and chemical reactions
• Expands the theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and its use in coupled transport processes and chemical reactions in physical, chemical and biological systems
• Presents a unified analysis for transport and rate processes in various time and space scales
• Discusses stochastic approaches in thermodynamic analysis, including fluctuation and information theories, mesoscopic nonequilibrium thermodynamics, constructal law and quantum thermodynamics