ABSTRACT
The methods of thermodynamics allow the reader to establish relationships between various properties of a system so that the measurement of one property permits other properties to be deduced without further measurement. Helmholtz and Gibbs potentials are particularly important and are involved in bridge relationships between macroscopic and microscopic descriptions of systems. The four Maxwell relations that are derived in the chapter are of great use in thermodynamics because they relate various partial derivatives of thermodynamic functions to each other. The Maxwell relations together with the equation of state for a system permit the thermodynamic analysis of a variety of physical processes to which the system may be subjected. It is useful for a number of applications to establish general expressions for entropy changes in terms of changes in state variables.
