SOLID-PHASE REACTION-KINETICS - TOWARDS DEEPER INSIGHT THROUGH A DISCRETE DESCRIPTION

Among other fields of heterogeneous chemistry, heterogeneous chemical kinetics was one of the first to become a separate branch. In essence, its basic concepts and particular manner of reasoning, different from both homogeneous kinetics and physical kinetics, are due to the geome tric-probabilistic approach to solid-phase reaction kinetics. But nowa days this approach seems less adequate because of a number of intrinsi c issues and also because of the poor agreement of its continual chara cter with some important relevant results of synergetics, complexity t heory, theory of fractals, etc. At the same time its potency is far fr om exhausted: along with the conventional continual representation the geometric-probabilistic scheme admits an alternative discrete represe ntation. This possibility is due to the recent progress in stochastic geometry which provides, in its turn, the grounds for employing the th eory of planigons developed a little earlier. What we may discuss, and in what way, depends on the language we speak. The language of planig ons, random mosaics, and also the third variety of Dirichlet tessellat ions, Wigner-Seitz cells, enables one to obtain a deeper insight into the chemical essence of solid-phase reactions through representing the chemical individuality of a solid reagent in the mathematical kinetic models. This provides a broad context for discussing some crucial con ceptual points of modern solid-phase reaction kinetics, which otherwis e remain in the shadows. In particular, from this angle a number of es sential issues become more explicit, and numerous failures in experime ntal data interpretation find subtler explanation.