Kinetic Aspects of Thermal Analysis

I. INTRODUCTION

Roughly 20% of thermoanalytical publications deal with reaction kinetics or contain reaction kinetic evaluations.¹ Unfortunately, a great portion of these publications have presented contradictory or meaningless results, which induced a great deal of pessimism about the applicability of reaction kinetics for the evaluation of thermoanalytical curves.^2–4 In our opinion, however, the cause of the problem must be searched mainly in the application of oversimplified kinetic equations for processes composed from several chemical, physical, and physicochemical subprocesses. Careless experimental work and poor mathematical evaluation techniques have also contributed to the wrong performance of the reaction kinetics in this field. In the present review, we analyze the causes of this situation in detail. The discussion is concerned with the evaluation of nonisothermal experiments on reactions having at least one solid reactant.