Thermoelasto-viscous materials (Q717503)

The paper presents, within the framework of Walter Noll's theory of simple materials, the development of constitutive laws suitable for thermo-elastic viscous materials. For such materials, the constitutive laws governing the quantities of interest such as stress, entropy, free energy and heat flux depend on the present values of temperature, temperature gradient and transplacement gradient, velocity gradient and the rate of change of temperature. The author successfully endeavors to derive a more generalized set of constitutive laws by additionally including dependence on the rate of change of temperature gradient. The work presented in this paper sets itself apart from other similar works in the literature as it develops the constitutive laws of thermoelasto-viscous materials without the use of external frame of reference, see [\textit{W. Noll}, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 48, 1--50 (1972; Zbl 0271.73006)]. The paper is divided into 9 sections. Section 2 presents the concepts related to continuous bodies, placements and configurations. The foundations for the general framework are discussed in Section 3, taking advantage of the second law of thermodynamics. Section 4 gives the definition of a thermoelastic material and the related Coleman-Knoll procedure. The concepts, presented in Section 4 for a thermoelastic material, are then generalized in Section 5 to a thermoelasto-viscous material. The symmetry group for a thermoelasto-viscous material (together with some related results) is defined in Section 6, whereas Section 7 discusses the constitutive laws for a fluid. Section 8 shows the reduction of frame-free constitutive laws to those that incorporate a frame of reference. The governing equations that are obtained by substituting the constitutive laws into the balance laws are described in Section 9. Future potential development in this area is outlined in Section 10. It is an interesting paper that needs a good knowledge and understanding of various mathematical concepts.