The effect of conservative and dissipative elements in chemical reactions

This paper is devoted to study the degree of contribution of both conservative and dissipative elements at the mesoscopic scale that can affect the behavior of macroscopic variables. Chemical reactions have been contemplated as purely dissipative processes, but usually their mathematical formulation is based in macroscopic variables. In order to have a wider picture of this phenomenon it is needed to introduce more detail to their formulation, i.e., considering a smaller scale. It is shown that conservative elements at the mesoscopic scale can affect the entropy production by transiently "pulling away" the system from the thermodynamic equilibrium. A study case of an isolated system with a single reaction is presented to illustrate this fact.