
Appendix D
Melting, Dissolution, and Phase Changes
The study of phase change and chemical reactions involves from the outset the mag-
ical art of thermodynamics. I have yet to meet an applied mathematician who claims
to understand thermodynamics, and the interface of the subject with fluid dynamics
raises serious fundamental issues. These we skirt, providing instead a cookbook of
recipes. The initial material can be found in Batchelor (1967), while its extension to
phase change and reaction involves (geo)chemical thermodynamics, as expounded
by Kern and Weisbrod (1967) and Nordstrom and Munoz (1994), for example.
D.1 Thermodynamics of Pure substances
The state of a pure material is described by two independent quantities, such as
temperature and pressure. Any other property of the material is then in principle a
function of these two. Among such properties we have the volume, V ; the internal
energy, E; and a number of thermodynamic variables: the entropy S, the enthalpy
H , the Helmholtz free energy F , and the Gibbs free energy G.
We distinguish between intensive and extensive variables. Intensive variables are
those which describe properties of the material; they are local. Pressure and tem-
perature are examples of intensive variables. Extensive variables are those which
depend on the amount of material; volume is one such variable. Typically, exten-
sive variables are simply intensive variables multiplied by the amount of substance,
measured in moles.
1
If n moles of a substance have extensive variables V , H , S, E,
F and G (all capitals), then the corresponding intensive variables are the specific
volume v =V/n, and the specific enthalpy, entropy, internal energy, Gibbs free en-
1
A mole of a substance is a fixed number (Avogadro’s number, ≈6×10
23
) of molecules (or atoms,
as appropriate) of it. The weight of one mole in grams is called the (gram) molecular weight. The
molecular weight of compound substances is easily found. For example, carbon (C) has a molecular
weight of 12, while oxygen (O
2
) has a molecular weight of 32; thus the molecular weight of CO
2
is 44, and we can write M
CO
2
=44 ×10
−3
kg mole
−1
.
A. Fowler, Mathematical Geoscience, Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics 36,
DOI 10.1007/978-0-85729-721-1, © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011
817