Preface : This book is intended to be a companion to Kubaschewski’s Metallurgical Thermochemistry, and as such deals primarily with the kinetic and transport theory of high temperature chemical reactions. I have chosen the title Thermochemical Processes rather than High Temperature Materials Chemistry since many of the important industrial processes which are described hardly deserve the high temperature connotation, and such a title would have implied a larger structural and thermodynamic content than is required for the description of
the industrial processing of materials. It will be seen that the book has a significant content from the chemical engineer’s approach, and I feel that this rapprochement with the materials scientist is overdue. The origins of the material contained in this book are to be found in the rapid growth of the scientific description of extractive metallurgical processes which began after World War II. This field was dominated by thermodynamics originally, and the development of kinetic and transport descriptions of these processes followed later. At that time the study of glasses and ceramics was largely confined to phase diagrams of the multicomponent systems, and processes in which gaseous reaction kinetics were rate-controlling were of more interest to the chemist than to the materials scientist, a field which, practically, did not exist in that era.



