Thermodynamical frameworks for higher grade material theories with internal variables or additional degrees of freedom (Q861375)

The authors consider thermodynamical frameworks which take into account the influence of internal variables and their gradients and the temperature gradient. These frameworks are based on the second law of thermodynamics, according to Liu's method, which leads to a set of equations and to a residual inequality. In the first part of their paper, the authors describe a material which is supposed to be non micropolar, but which has an internal variable possibly occurring with its first-order gradient. They write the balance equations for mass, momentum and energy conservation. They then apply Liu's method in order to write properties of the free energy density. The authors then move to the case of higher gradient theory. The state space indeed contains the two first and second gradients of the displacement field, the temperature and its first-order gradient. Once again, the authors write the balance equations. They use the Coleman-Noll approach in order to apply the second law of thermodynamics. The residual inequality leads to a simplification of the dependence of the extra entropy flux. In the fourth part of the paper, the author assume the presence of an internal variable \( \alpha \) which is the solution of an evolution differential equation \( \partial \alpha /\partial t+\nabla \cdot J_{\alpha }=\pi _{\alpha }\), where \( J_{\alpha }\) (resp. \(\pi _{\alpha }\)) is a flux (resp. source) term. In the last part of the paper, the authors move to higher gradient theories, assuming that the gradients of the strain up to the order \(n\) are involved, with first or second time derivatives of the temperature. The purpose of this part is here to simplify the dependence of the extra entropy flux. In the conclusion, the authors summarize their results in a table and compare them with earlier results obtained by Maugin, Mindlin and others.