A critical assessment of a published paper (by Agrawal) is presented. The procedure proposed and used by Agrawal to distinguish a false compensation effect from a true one is shown not to be COITeCt.In a recent paper, Agrawal [1] proposed some checkpoints for the drawing of conclusions regarding the occurrence of a true or false compensation effect (CE).In the introduction he shows that by applying the Arrhenius equationin the field of heterogeneous kinetics, both A and E have little physical significance. He sees the main cause of this in the lack of a definition for a "mole of solid". It is well known that the application of Eq. (1), valid for homogeneous gas-phase reactions, is an absolutely unjustified extrapolation [2]. Even if the validity of Eq.(1) were proved for certain heterogeneous reactions, the meanings of A and E would be rather obscure, due to the high complexity of the heterogeneous processes involving .solid-state reactions, gas evolution, diffusion, etc. How could the definition of a "mole of solid" help? If the rate constant k actually varies with Tin the way prescribed by Eq. (1), from the experimental data a magnitude can be derived having the dimension of temperature (let us call it the characteristic temperature O), denoted in Eq. (1) by E/R, since it can be transformed into energy per mole by multiplying it by R, or into energy per molecule by multiplying it by the Boltzmann constant. The definition of a mole of solid affects the amount of energy calculated from O, but it cannot clarify the physical meaning of this energy. If a linear relation between In A and Eis observed for a series of related reactions, it is referred to as a CE, formally involving an "isokinetic point", i.e. a temperature
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