ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between reliability physics and the science of thermodynamics. In thermodynamics, the quantity entropy defines the property of matter that measures the degree of microscopic disorder that appears at the macroscopic level. In thermodynamics, it is important to define both the system and its neighboring environment. The notions of reversible and irreversible processes define two regimes called equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Thermodynamics also provides a natural way to define a system’s state through macroscopic state variables such as temperature, volume, and pressure. It is commonly used to interpret cyclic forced processes in which heat and work are interchanged. Corrosion is an interesting process because it demonstrates important thermodynamic facets of aging. Corrosion shows the importance of the activation process via the Arrhenius relationship, the electropotential external stress, and concentration.
