Physical Nature of Chemical Potential in Ideal and Real Gas Mixtures

4 PHYSICAL NATURE OF CHEMICAL POTENTIAL IN IDEAL AND REAL GAS MIXTURES 

In order to better understand the physical nature of the chemical potential jxt of a chemical substance, let us first review the major mathematical features of the Gibbsian thermodynamics formalism. The starting point is the Gibbs fundamental equation for the internal energy function 

From the fundamental equation, we derive the equations of state for the intensive fields Rt as the successive partial derivatives 

Equations (6.41)-(6.44) summarize the basic mathematical structure of the theory. 

Let us now consider a system that is initially partitioned into two regions a, (3 of differing Rt values, 

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