Finite-time Thermodynamics Tools to Analyze Dissipative Processes

“Staging free energy” is a term introduced to describe the necessary investment of free energy into a thermodynamic system to allow certain near equilibrium processes to proceed in a desired direction and in finite time (Chapter 4). Such processes may seem—if viewed detached from their surroundings—to be truly reversible. However, if one views them together with the changes occurring in their environment, it becomes clear that they are not completely reversible. This is the assumption formalized in Chapter 4 which asserts that truly reversible processes proceeding in finite time do not exist. Thus it was suggested in Chapter 4 to dub such processes invertible instead. Nonetheless, the seemingly reversible processes proceeding in finite time point to the problem that to localize the necessary dissipation is a nontrivial problem,