Local Equilibrium in Transient Heat Conduction

Extended irreversible thermodynamics (EIT) has been widely used to overcome the deficiencies of classical irreversible thermodynamics in describing fast transport phenomena. By employing fluxes as additional independent variables and rejecting local equilibrium hypothesis, EIT may provide a thermody...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kirill Glavatskiy
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-01-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/27/2/100
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Summary:Extended irreversible thermodynamics (EIT) has been widely used to overcome the deficiencies of classical irreversible thermodynamics in describing fast transport phenomena. By employing fluxes as additional independent variables and rejecting local equilibrium hypothesis, EIT may provide a thermodynamically consistent framework for high-frequency and non-local processes. Here, we propose an alternative approach to EIT that shares the same objective but does not reject local equilibrium hypothesis. Using the rates of change of the energy density as the additional independent variable, we illustrate this approach for two typical problems of transient heat conduction: the Cattaneo-type flux model with thermodynamic inertia and the two-temperature model of energy transfer in a phonon–electron system.
ISSN:1099-4300