entropy Article Some Aspects of Time-Reversal in Chemical Kinetics Ulrich Maas Institut für Technische Thermodynamik, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany;
[email protected] Received: 20 November 2020; Accepted: 4 December 2020; Published: 7 December 2020 Abstract: Chemical kinetics govern the dynamics of chemical systems leading towards chemical equilibrium. There are several general properties of the dynamics of chemical reactions such as the existence of disparate time scales and the fact that most time scales are dissipative. This causes a transient relaxation to lower dimensional attracting manifolds in composition space. In this work, we discuss this behavior and investigate how a time reversal effects this behavior. For this, both macroscopic chemical systems as well as microscopic chemical systems (elementary reactions) are considered. Keywords: chemical kinetics; time reversal; time scales; low-dimensional manifolds 1. Introduction The thermodynamic time arrow is based on the second law of thermodynamics: entropy increases with time. In thermodynamic equilibrium, however, no distinction between past and future can be made. In chemical systems, the dynamics towards chemical equilibrium is governed by chemical kinetics. The description of chemical kinetics is a difficult task because different hierarchical levels are involved (see Figure1). In typical reacting flows, an overall system is described by the time- and space dependent fields of mean velocities of the different species involved, and the time- and space dependent thermokinetic states. For chemically reacting flows, in many cases, a continuum description can be used, which relies on macroscopic balance equations for mass, momentum, energy, and species masses. These equations have been discussed in detail in many articles [1–3].