Abstract
It would be fruitless or futile to question the law of mass conservation, especially at the (macroscopic or mesoscopic) level of chemical reaction kinetics. However, many models, let us only mention the Lotka–Volterra reaction here, became known and turned out to be useful in the last half century. These models belong to the area of formal reaction kinetics, i.e., they may consist of species not directly corresponding to species with atomic structures. Such a model—as the Lotka–Volterra model—may have the property that it does not conserve mass formally. Therefore it is an important, and as the chapter shows, nontrivial question how is it possible to decide if the stoichiometry of a reaction alone allows, implies, or excludes mass conservation. Conditions to ensure these and algorithms with programs to check these conditions are presented here.
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Tóth, J., Nagy, A.L., Papp, D. (2018). Mass Conservation. In: Reaction Kinetics: Exercises, Programs and Theorems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8643-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8643-9_4
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