Chemistry

General Educational Target To complete the education and training of students in the field of physicochemical thermodynamics at a graduate level Specific Educational Targets A) Knowledge and understanding. This class is aimed at giving students a body of knowledge that can be summarized by four points: 1) to deepen the understanding of fundamentals of thermodynamics (that students were introduced to in the Chimica Fisica I class during the undergraduate course) with special emphasis on the second law of thermodynamics, which is presented by an approach based on the concept of entropy production as the driving force for the irreversible processes; 2) to illustrate the thermodynamic treatment of one-component or fixed-composition systems with a systematic and mathematically rigorous approach, by deriving the total differentials of all the thermodynamic functions involved in physicochemical problems; 3) to extend the thermodynamic treatment to processes and systems more complex than those addressed by students in the elementary courses: real gases, multicomponent real solutions and phase diagrams, heterogeneous chemically reactive systems, high-pressure phenomena, systems with curved interfaces, etc.; 4) to illustrate the basic aspects of the most important experimental techniques used to determine thermodynamic properties. B) Applying knowledge and understanding. With regard to the ability in applying the above reported contents, a part of the classes is intended to enable students 1) to solve practical problems of applied thermodynamics and thermochemistry, such as to calculate heat, work, and changes of thermodynamic functions in reversible and irreversible processes, to evaluate the driving force of irreversible processes, the mixing properties in multicomponent solutions, the equilibrium phases and their compositions in reactive and non-reactive systems, to read and discuss two- and three-component phase diagrams, etc. and 2) to give students a good command of the mathematical handling of thermodynamic functions and expressions, enabling them to derive autonomously other relations useful in solving specific physicochemical problems.