On the Measurement and Evaluation of Separation

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Abstract
The entropy of multicomponent mixtures is examined and two reference states of unique entropy values are defined, the completely mixed and the separated states. The position of any system relative to these fixed points is accounted for in terms of four entropy terms, one for chemical specie separation and three for physical or spatial separations. An apt comparison of separations must acknowledge the possibility of these four distinct processes. An alternative approach to the evaluation of a separation is based on the reduction of the information in a matrix of pairwise criterion of separation to a single point in vector space. This vector distance as a measure of separation is illustrated for differential migration processes.