Thermodynamics
and
Information Theory: Stability
considerations about porous media
A session of "The Fourth Biot
Conference on
Poromechanics"(http://www.civil.columbia.edu/biot/),
When Biot developed the theory of fluid
mixtures and
stability of porous media, he recognized the difficulties posed by the
Gibbs Paradox (http://www.mdpi.org/lin/entropy/gibbs-paradox.htm).
Three of his papers are closely related to the resolution of Gibbs
Paradox. He
is also well-known for the work on variational
principles in thermodynamics (see a list of his thermodynamics
papers http://www.mdpi.org/lin/09meetings/biot/biot-papers.htm).
When a porous medium is subjected to thermodynamic studies,
"containers"
of the fluids must be considered as part of the system under study, but
thermodynamics
treat the fluid (gases, liquids or solutions) body as the concerned
system. The
heat engine system considered in thermodynamics does not include the
container.
What is worse, Gibbs Paradox (for a list of relevant literature, see http://www.mdpi.org/lin/entropy/gibbs-paradox.htm)
states that the separation of the porous medium to form a bulky fluid
phase and
a pure bulky solid phase would not lead to any change in thermodynamic
parameters; these two structures are of the same stability, which,
intuitively,
must be wrong. Recently carried out
active studies on Gibbs Paradox shed some light on this fundamental
problem
and, if agreed and accepted, the conclusions can be used as a
theoretical
foundation to study the stability of porous structures.
I would like to invite you to contribute a talk or a poster for the
session of
"Thermodynamics and Information Theory" where the stability
characterization of porous media will be our main concern, in addition
to other
aspects of stability studies. Experts who work on mechanical aspects
may find
the thermodynamics and information theory approaches very useful. You
may download the flyer at http://www.civil.columbia.edu/biot/flyer.pdf.
One-page abstracts can be submitted by e-mail at
[email protected]
(deadline: 31 May 2008), indicating
the "Thermodynamics
and Information Theory" session. You may find my own abstract at http://www.mdpi.org/lin/09meetings/biot/Lin-abstract.doc.
Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D.
Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI), Matthaeusstrasse
11,
CH-4057 Basel,
Switzerland; Tel. (+41) 79 322 3379; Fax: (+41) 61 302 8918; E-mail:
http://www.mdpi.org/lin
Basel, 18 April 2008