Engineering: The challenge of temperature
◄Previous: 4.3.3 Getting at the activation energy

# 4.4 Summary of Section 4

- Thermal energy is a random thing, so any group of particles possessing it will have a distribution of kinetic energies.

- The fraction of particles with energy greater than an amount E﻿1 is proportional to exp(−E﻿1/kT).

- Thermally activated rates follow Arrhenius's law and are characterised by an activation energy.

- Diffusion in solids and electrical conduction in ceramics are thermally activated processes.

◄Contents►Next: 5 Sudden temperature effects

OpenLearn - Engineering: The challenge of temperature
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.