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In physics, chemistry, and other related fields like biology, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of matter : solid , liquid , and gas , and in rare cases, plasma .
A phase-change material (PCM) is a substance which releases/absorbs sufficient energy at phase transition to provide useful heat or cooling. Generally the transition will be from one of the first two fundamental states of matter - solid and liquid - to the other.
In the physical sciences, a phase is a region of material that is chemically uniform, physically distinct, and (often) mechanically separable. In a system consisting of ice and water in a glass jar, the ice cubes are one phase, the water is a second phase, and the humid air is a third phase over the ice and water.
Two main thermal characteristics of phase change are the enthalpy-temperature relationship and temperature hysteresis. PCMs tend to have varying enthalpy temperature relationships due to the fact that they are blends of different materials, but pure PCMs have a more localized relationship, which can be approximated by single values for the enthalpy and phase change temperature.
Phase transitions (phase changes) that help describe polymorphism include polymorphic transitions as well as melting and vaporization transitions. According to IUPAC, a polymorphic transition is "A reversible transition of a solid crystalline phase at a certain temperature and pressure (the inversion point) to another phase of the same chemical composition with a different crystal structure."
This causes the water vapour to change directly into a solid. Another example is the soot that is deposited on the walls of chimneys. Soot molecules rise from the fire in a hot and gaseous state. When they come into contact with the walls they cool, and change to the solid state, without formation of the liquid state.
The solid phase is commonly referred to as a “gel” phase. All lipids have a characteristic temperature at which they undergo a transition from the gel to liquid phase. In both phases the lipid molecules are constrained to the two dimensional plane of the membrane, but in liquid phase bilayers the molecules diffuse freely within this plane.
One type of phase diagram plots temperature against the relative concentrations of two substances in a binary mixture called a binary phase diagram, as shown at right. Such a mixture can be either a solid solution, eutectic or peritectic, among others. These two types of mixtures result in very different graphs.