Friday, May 11, 2018

physical chemistry - Gibbs Free Energy and Maximum Work


I am a high school student and my professor mentioned that the Gibbs free energy is the maximum amount of work (or useful work) that a system can do, whereas entropy is a measure of the non-available enthalpy.



I am not able to understand this and it would be helpful if you could explain this or link to some resources that could explain this at a high school level (I know some multivariable calculus, but not that comfortable with it) as I have difficulty finding them.


Also, we used the fact that Gibbs free energy is the maximum amount of work to derive the equation $∆G = -nFE$ and then proceeded to derive the Nernst equation.




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periodic trends - Comparing radii in lithium, beryllium, magnesium, aluminium and sodium ions

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