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Knowledge of an enzyme's resistance to high temperatures is especially beneficial in protein purification. In the procedure of heat denaturation, one can subject a mixture of proteins to high temperatures, which will result in the denaturation of proteins that are not thermostable, and the isolation of the protein that is thermodynamically stable.
A thermodynamic system in a state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium has a spatially uniform temperature. Its intensive properties, other than temperature, may be driven to spatial inhomogeneity by an unchanging long-range force field imposed on it by its surroundings.
The ideal temperature for a reaction under thermodynamic control is the lowest temperature at which equilibrium will be reached in a reasonable amount of time. [15] If needed, the selectivity can be increased by then slowly cooling the reaction mixture to shift the equilibrium further toward the most stable product.
This type of chemical thermodynamic equilibrium will persist indefinitely unless the system is changed. Chemical systems might undergo changes in the phase of matter or a set of chemical reactions. State A is said to be more thermodynamically stable than state B if the Gibbs free energy of the change from A to B is positive.
a) Single possible configuration for a system at absolute zero, i.e., only one microstate is accessible. b) At temperatures greater than absolute zero, multiple microstates are accessible due to atomic vibration (exaggerated in the figure). At absolute zero temperature, the system is in the state with the minimum thermal energy, the ground state.
Thermodynamic temperature is a specifically thermodynamic concept, while the original directly measureable state variables are defined by ordinary physical measurements, without reference to thermodynamic concepts; for this reason, it is helpful to regard thermodynamic temperature as a state function.
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In thermodynamics, a spontaneous process is a process which occurs without any external input to the system. A more technical definition is the time-evolution of a system in which it releases free energy and it moves to a lower, more thermodynamically stable energy state (closer to thermodynamic equilibrium).