Maxwell's thermodynamic relations are very useful in solving problems in thermodynamics. Each of Maxwell's relations relates a partial differential between quantities that can be hard to measure experimentally to a partial differential between quantities that can be easily measured. These relations are a set of equations derivable from the symmetry of the second derivatives and the thermodynamic potentials.
All thermodynamic potentials are exact differentials. Therefore, their second-order...

Thermodynamic potentials are state functions that are extremely useful in analyzing a thermodynamic system. They have dimensions of energy. The four important thermodynamic potentials are internal energy, enthalpy, Helmholtz free energy, and Gibbs free energy. These thermodynamic potentials can be expressed using two of the following variables: pressure, volume, temperature, and entropy. These two variables are expressed as the rate of change of the thermodynamic potential with respect to other...

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was one of the significant contributors to physics in the nineteenth century. He is probably best known for having combined existing knowledge of the laws of electricity and the laws of magnetism with his insights to form a complete overarching electromagnetic theory, represented by Maxwell's equations. The four basic laws of electricity and magnetism were discovered experimentally through the work of physicists such as Oersted, Coulomb, Gauss, and...

Activity is the measure of the effective concentration of the species in solution. It can be expressed as the product of the molar concentration of the species and its activity coefficient. The activity coefficient is a dimensionless quantity and depends on the total ionic strength of the solution.
The activity coefficient is a measure of the deviation from ideal behavior. When the ionic strength of the solution is minimal, the activity coefficient of an ionic species is close to unity, making...

A thermodynamic system is a set of objects whose thermodynamic properties are of interest. The system is considered to be embedded in its surroundings or the environment. The system and its environment can exchange heat and do work on each other through a boundary that separates them. However, the immediate surroundings of the system interact with it directly and therefore have a much stronger influence on its behavior and properties.
Consider an example of  tea boiling in a kettle. The...

Sigmatropic rearrangements are a class of pericyclic reactions in which a σ bond migrates from one part of a π system to another. These are intramolecular rearrangements where the total number of σ and π bonds remain unchanged.
Sigmatropic shifts are classified based on an order term [i, j ], where i and j indicate the number of atoms across which each end of the σ bond migrates. Below are examples of a [3,3] sigmatropic shift in...