Lessons in Thermodynamics of Solutions and Liquid Mixtures
Review by David Bradley
Chemists at Leicester University, England, have built an educational website
covering all aspects of thermodynamics in 300 topics. If I remember rightly
from my University days, thermodynamics was one of the tougher areas of chemistry
to master, but once you had it covered many other aspects of the
subject fell into place. To quote from the introductory section to this new
site: "Thermodynamics offers an elegant summary of the experience gained by
chemists in chemical laboratories and an indication of how experimental data
can be analysed to gain an understanding of chemical reactions. For the most
part chemists are concerned with the properties of solutions in the context
of (i) chemical equilibriums, and (ii) chemical reactions between solute
molecules, thereby synthesising new chemical substances. Underlying these
important phenomena, chemical equilibriums and spontaneous chemical reactions,
are quantitative statements based on chemical thermodynamics". If you've
been struggling with your enthalpies and entropies, then this is the place
to go to help you grasp those concepts.