An experimental thermokinetic study of reaction sintering reveals that there are various irreversible paths in a nonequilibrium system. When the external temperature is in the contact melting range and the equilibrium condition of the mixture is in the solid-state range, the thermokinetic path is usually exponential with abrupt increase in the temperature and volume of the samples. Active compaction is observed in the case of thermokinetic oscillations Temporarily excited nonequilibrium physicochemical systems are of interest primarily due to the potential use of stored free energy for the synthesis of inorganic compounds, reaction-activated sintering, and other applications in solving unconventional problems that may result from a specific behavior in irreversible processes.Reaction processes in powder mixtures are indirectly dealt with in analyzing the liquid-phase sintering of systems with interacting components [1, 2]. The irreversible reaction processes also include self-propagating hightemperature synthesis (SHS) [3,4].The behavior of these systems, which is associated with specific features of irreversible processes, is still to be studied. In particular, the paper [5] does not establish the physics and chemistry of phenomena that can determine new processing and functional capabilities.Moreover, fundamentals of reaction interaction are needed since the physicochemical kinetics of heterogeneous systems has not been developed so far [6]. The formal phenomenological approach [6,7] underlying it neither explained some phenomena observed earlier nor promotes the development or application of nonequilibrium reaction processes both in the synthesis of inorganic compounds with new functional properties and * This section represents articles based on papers delivered at the ICS IX⎯International Conference on Sintering (Kiev, September 7-11, 2009).

No abstract