  Diffusion preserves the positivity of concentrations, therefore,
multicomponent diffusion should be nonlinear if there exist non-diagonal terms.
The vast variety of nonlinear multicomponent diffusion equations should be
ordered and special tools are needed to provide the systematic construction of
the nonlinear diffusion equations for multicomponent mixtures with significant
interaction between components. We develop an approach to nonlinear
multicomponent diffusion based on the idea of the reaction mechanism borrowed
from chemical kinetics.
  Chemical kinetics gave rise to very seminal tools for the modeling of
processes. This is the stoichiometric algebra supplemented by the simple
kinetic law. The results of this invention are now applied in many areas of
science, from particle physics to sociology. In our work we extend the area of
applications onto nonlinear multicomponent diffusion.
  We demonstrate, how the mechanism based approach to multicomponent diffusion
can be included into the general thermodynamic framework, and prove the
corresponding dissipation inequalities. To satisfy thermodynamic restrictions,
the kinetic law of an elementary process cannot have an arbitrary form. For the
general kinetic law (the generalized Mass Action Law), additional conditions
are proved. The cell--jump formalism gives an intuitively clear representation
of the elementary transport processes and, at the same time, produces kinetic
finite elements, a tool for numerical simulation.
