Abstract
IN solids, the rates of kinetic processes such as volume diffusion and order–disorder transitions are extremely sensitive to temperature. At room temperatures they are so slow that crystalline solids normally preserve a substantial degree of thermodynamic disequilibrium over very long periods (> 109 yr in some cases). At sufficiently high temperatures, on the other hand, some processes go so fast that a continuously varying state of equilibrium may be maintained as the temperature changes. When a solid cools steadily a transition occurs from the one state (continuous equilibrium) to the other (false equilibrium) in the neighbourhood of the closure temperature, which is defined below. Here I present a simple quantitative argument relating closure temperature to the cooling rate and kinetic parameters of a given kinetic system (see refs 1–6 for related work).
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References
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DODSON, M. Kinetic processes and thermal history of slowly cooling solids. Nature 259, 551–553 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1038/259551a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/259551a0
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