Local thermal equilibrium and ideal gas Stephani universes (Q2487284)

The authors study in a deductive and systematic way the question of obtaining of all Stephani universes that represent the evolution in local thermal equilibrium of a generic ideal gas and those that admit a first order contact in the temperature with the classical ideal gas. The main results of this paper are based on previous ones i.e. on an earlier obtained characterization of an ideal gas in local thermal equilibrium and on Bona and Coll thermodynamic schemes in Stephani universes. It is shown that five classes of thermodynamic schemes are admissible yielding, five classes of regular models and three classes of singular models. There are no Stephani universes representing an exact solution to a classical ideal gas, but some of them may approximate a classical ideal gas at first order in temperature. All such models are obtained in the paper. The authors present also analysis, how energy and compressibility conditions, restrict the domain where models have a good behaviour.