Thermodynamics future research applications

The ramifications of nanotechnology in the food arena have yet to be fully realized. This requires further research into biopolymer assembly behavior and applications of nanomaterials in the food industry. Researchers should keep abreast of the development of research tools and what is being done to push resolution limits for techniques such as atomic force spectroscopy or the synchrotron coupled to various spectroscopic techniques and higher resolution microscopy. New techniques should be exploited and the knowledge gained used to understand the dynamics and interactions of food materials at the single-molecule level and to describe assembly behavior in quantitative thermodynamic terms. There are questions about the interactions of nanoparticles with the food matrix and within the human body. These questions need to be addressed by future research (Simon and Joner, 2008 Sletmoen et ah, 2008). 

Modern opinion views the Nernst-Plank theory as a special case of applying the thermodynamics of irreversible processes to ion exchange. It may also be argued theoretically and experimentally that the observed characteristics of ion exchange rate behaviour can only be fully explained by including chemical reaction as a flux-coupling mechanism as well as the diffusion potential. From a research standpoint it is most probable that future theoretical advances in ion exchange kinetics will result from the further application of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. 

The history of chemical thermodynamics goes back 150 years and the subject has, for over a century, been the foundation for much of chemistry. This historical importance is often associated with an attitude that thermodynamics has little relevance to modern-day chemistry and will have little importance in the future development of chemistry. To counteract this, the lUPAC Commission 1.2 on Chemical Thermodynamics, published a volume entitled Chemical Thermodynamics for the 21st Century in 1999. It consisted of 27 chapters, all focusing on the applications of thermodynamics to very recent developments in chemistry. The aim was to highlight the role that thermodynamics was playing at the forefront of chemical research at the dawn of the 21st century. Three years later, in 2002, the International Association of Chemical Thermodynamics, lACT, the successor to Commission 1.2, decided to publish a collection of essays on applied chemical thermodynamic topics under the same editorship. 

Closer collaboration with indnstry, e.g., for testing existing theories for polymers with novel strnctnres, for commercial polymers for which so far the structure is not revealed to academic researchers, and for many other applications of practical interest. Many indnstrial systems are much more complex than the systems studied in academia. Closer collaboration in the future between academia and the polymer and paint/adhesives indns-tries may farther help the advancements in the area of polymer thermodynamics in the coming years. 

The extended corresponding-states theory incorporating shape factors can predict thermodynamic properties of mixtures precisely, especially if the exact or saturation- boundary methods are used. Due to the higher level of complexity of this method, recent applications have been limited to studies where very low uncertainty is of importance. Advances in the development of precise equations of state for a wide variety of substances (for example, heavier hydrocarbons, refrigprants and polar compounds such as alcohols, water and ammonia) have enabled researchers to extend the extended corresponding states methodology to a wide variety of systems and this trend will continue in the future. 

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