A critical analysis of the minimum entropy production theorem and its application to heat and fluid flow (Q2427671)

The authors consider two situations where the principle of minimum entropy production introduced by Prigogine leads to field equations which do not agree with the balance equations of continuum mechanics. In the first one, they consider a 1D heat conduction problem in a fluid at rest. They write the equation satisfied by the temperature \(T\) using the field equations and observing that the pressure is constant. When writing the principle of minimum entropy in this case and comparing the two equations, they observe that these equations are equivalent if and only if the thermal conductivity is equal to \(L/T^{2}\), for some constant \(L\). In a second example, the authors consider a 1D steady state shear flow with heat conduction in an incompressible fluid. Again they write the equation for the temperature and observe that the pressure must be a linear function of the \(x\)-variable. They then write the principle of minimum entropy and, after some computations using Lagrange multipliers, deduce another equation for the temperature. In the last part of their paper, the authors analyze the reasons which lead to such contradictions. They indeed analyze the proof of the principle of minimum entropy in the case of a discontinuous system with \( N\) state variables corresponding to different fluxes. They prove that the condition of stationary state has to be taken into account in a correct way.