Geochemistry and fluid flow / Геохимия и движение флюидов

Chemistry is familiar enough; fire and fermentation are cornerstones of human civilization, and the beaker and the test tube are readily recognizable icons in most of the world. Flow is even more familiar; everyone has seen a river, felt the wind, taken a pulse. Though they are rarely on the center stage, fluids that undergo chemical reactions as they flow also impact an astonishingly large number of human experiences. Examples of this include air purification, electro-chemical transport within the human brain, blood and air flow through lungs, flow through kidneys, catalytic converters, tooth decay, deterioration of historic objects, and nearly every large-scale manufacturing process, from semiconductors to paper. Besides the sheer number, the diversity of this list is impressive.

The numerous biological examples reflect an inevitability of Nature’s adoption of the flow-with-reaction model in the animal kingdom. Diffusion may provide adequate transport rates at the scale of a single cell, but making viable animals at the meter-scale generally demands quicker ways to deliver nutrients, provide fuel, remove waste, etc. Certain creatures manage to survive reasonably well by rooting themselves to one spot and waiting for food to arrive, in which case the flow-with-reaction model applies to the creature’s surroundings rather than the creature’s insides. Humans realized long ago the labor-saving and costreducing advantages of flow processes over batch processes, as even a brief inspection of the history of the chemical industry would show. <...>