Merle Randall
Encyclopedia
Merle Randall was an American physical chemist famous for his work, over the period of 25 years, in measuring free energy
Thermodynamic free energy
The thermodynamic free energy is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform. The concept is useful in the thermodynamics of chemical or thermal processes in engineering and science. The free energy is the internal energy of a system less the amount of energy that cannot be used to...

 calculations of compounds with Gilbert N. Lewis
Gilbert N. Lewis
Gilbert Newton Lewis was an American physical chemist known for the discovery of the covalent bond , his purification of heavy water, his reformulation of chemical thermodynamics in a mathematically rigorous manner accessible to ordinary chemists, his theory of Lewis acids and...

. Together, their 1923 textbook Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances became a classic work in the field of chemical thermodynamics
Chemical thermodynamics
Chemical thermodynamics is the study of the interrelation of heat and work with chemical reactions or with physical changes of state within the confines of the laws of thermodynamics...

.

In 1932, Merle Randall authored two scientific papers with Mikkel Frandsen
Mikkel Frandsen
Mikkel Frandsen was a Danish American physical chemist noted for experiments involving chemical thermodynamics, oil, and heavy water. Heavy water is water that has an unusual and distinctive atomic structure...

: “The Standard Electrode Potential of Iron and the Activity Coefficient of Ferrous Chloride,” and “Determination of the Free Energy of Ferrous Hydroxide from Measurements of Electromotive Force.”

Education

Randall completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1912 with a dissertation on “Studies in Free Energy”.

Related

Based on work by J. Willard Gibbs, it was known that chemical reactions proceeded to an equilibrium
Chemical equilibrium
In a chemical reaction, chemical equilibrium is the state in which the concentrations of the reactants and products have not yet changed with time. It occurs only in reversible reactions, and not in irreversible reactions. Usually, this state results when the forward reaction proceeds at the same...

 determined by the free energy
Thermodynamic free energy
The thermodynamic free energy is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform. The concept is useful in the thermodynamics of chemical or thermal processes in engineering and science. The free energy is the internal energy of a system less the amount of energy that cannot be used to...

 of the substances taking part. Using this theory Gilbert Lewis spent 25 years determining free energies of various substances. In 1923 he and Randall published the results of this study and formalizing chemical thermodynamics.

According to the Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine
Ilya Prigogine
Ilya, Viscount Prigogine was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.-Biography :...

, their influential 1923 textbook led to the replacement of the term “affinity
Chemical affinity
In chemical physics and physical chemistry, chemical affinity is the electronic property by which dissimilar chemical species are capable of forming chemical compounds...

” by the term “free energy
Thermodynamic free energy
The thermodynamic free energy is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform. The concept is useful in the thermodynamics of chemical or thermal processes in engineering and science. The free energy is the internal energy of a system less the amount of energy that cannot be used to...

” in much of the English-speaking world.

Further reading

  • Elementary Physical Chemistry (1942)
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