Energy estimates and energy control of numerical stability in coupled dynamic thermoelasticity (Q1905538)

We deduce energy identities for some elastic materials as: linear elastic solids, ideal gases, and van der Waals fluids. By recalling the second law of thermodynamics, the energy identities become inequalities. The energy functions entering the energy identities have ``good properties'' with respect to the reference configurations such that they can be used to obtain energy bounds for solutions of initial boundary value problems in terms of the input data. As an application, we give energetic bounds on the time and distance integration steps of a Godunov type numerical scheme such that it preserves the non-increasing property of the total energy. Therefore the proposed numerical scheme is numerically stable.