Is Soret equilibrium a non-equilibrium effect?

Abstract

Recent thermophoretic experiments on colloidal suspensions revived an old debate, namely whether the Soret effect is properly described by thermostatics, or necessarily requires non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Based on colloidal transport theory and the entropy production of the related viscous flow, our analysis leads to the conclusion that the equilibrium approach may work for small ions, yet fails for colloidal particles and polymers. Regarding binary molecular mixtures, our results shed some doubt on the validity of thermostatic approaches that derive the Soret coefficient from equilibrium potentials.

9 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Transport in Charged Colloids Driven by Thermoelectricity

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Hydrodynamic boundary effects on thermophoresis of confined colloids
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• The Directionality of Gravitational and Thermal Diffusive Transport in Geologic Fluid Storage
• Contribution of internal degree of freedom of soft molecules to Soret effect