Volume 41, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The International Workshop on Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics IWNET2015, Guest Editors: Markus Hütter and Ger Koper

The elasto-viscoplasticity of amorphous solids is modeled, with a focus on the effects of physical aging and mechanical rejuvenation. Using nonequilibrium thermodynamics, the concept of kinetic and configurational subsystems has been employed. The Hamiltonian structure of reversible dynamics is exploited to derive a constitutive relation for the stress tensor. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that accounting for mechanical rejuvenation results in a modification of the driving force for viscoplastic flow.

The derivation of time evolution equations for slow collective variables starting from a microscopic model system is demonstrated for the tutorial example of the classical, two-dimensional XY model. Projection operator techniques are used within a nonequilibrium thermodynamics framework together with molecular simulations in order to establish the building blocks of the hydrodynamics equations: Poisson brackets that determine the deterministic drift, the driving forces from the macroscopic free energy and the friction matrix. The approach is rather general and can be applied for deriving the equations of slow variables for a broad variety of systems.

We study the effect on the stationary currents of constraints affecting the hopping rates in stochastic particle systems. In the framework of zero range processes with drift within a finite volume, we discuss how the current is reduced by the presence of the constraint and deduce exact formulae, fully explicit in some cases. The model discussed here has been introduced by Cirillo et al. (Does communication enhance pedestrians transport in the dark? To appear in C. R. Mécanique 344 (2016), 19–23) and is relevant for the description of pedestrian motion in elongated dark corridors, where the constraint on the hopping rates can be related to limitations on the interaction distance among pedestrians, but finds also applications in the modeling of various transport phenomena.

We introduce a new class of stochastic processes in Rn,$${{\rm{\mathbb R}}^n}, $$ referred to as generalized Poisson–Kac (GPK) processes, that generalizes the Poisson–Kac telegrapher’s random motion in higher dimensions. These stochastic processes possess finite propagation velocity, almost everywhere smooth trajectories, and converge in the Kac limit to Brownian motion. GPK processes are defined by coupling the selection of a bounded velocity vector from a family of N distinct ones with a Markovian dynamics controlling probabilistically this selection. This model can be used as a probabilistic tool for a stochastically consistent formulation of extended thermodynamic theories far from equilibrium.

A local fluctuation–dissipation theorem for the power delivered by a stochastic forcing is derived for Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes driven by smooth, i. e. almost everywhere (a. e.)-differentiable stochastic perturbations (Poisson–Kac processes). An analytic expression for the probability density function of the fluctuational power is obtained in the large time limit. As these processes converge, in the Kac limit, toward classical Langevin equations driven by Wiener processes, a coarse-grained analysis of the statistical properties of the fluctuational work is developed.

Systems whose dynamics result from the existence of a wide variety of time and length scales frequently exhibit slow relaxation behavior, manifested through the aging compartment of the correlations and the nonexponential decay of the response function. Experiments performed in systems such as amorphous polymers and supercooled liquids and glasses seem to indicate that these systems undergo, in general, non-Markovian and nonstationary dynamics. Hence, in this contribution, we present a dynamical description of slow relaxation systems based on a generalization of Onsager’s theory to nonequilibrium aging states. By assuming the existence of a local quasi-equilibrium state characterized by a nonstationary probability distribution the entropy of the system is expressed in terms of the conditional probability density by means of the Gibbs entropy postulate. Thus, by taking into account probability conservation and the rules of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, the generalized Fokker–Planck equation is derived.

The purpose of the current work is the comparison of thermodynamic model formulations for chemically and structurally inhomogeneous solids at finite deformation based on “standard” non-equilibrium thermodynamics [SNET: e. g. S. de Groot and P. Mazur, Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics, North Holland, 1962] and the general equation for non-equilibrium reversible–irreversible coupling (GENERIC) [H. C. Öttinger, Beyond Equilibrium Thermodynamics, Wiley Interscience, 2005]. In the process, non-isothermal generalizations of standard isothermal conservative [e. g. J. W. Cahn and J. E. Hilliard, Free energy of a non-uniform system. I. Interfacial energy. J. Chem. Phys. 28 (1958), 258–267] and non-conservative [e. g. S. M. Allen and J. W. Cahn, A macroscopic theory for antiphase boundary motion and its application to antiphase domain coarsening. Acta Metall. 27 (1979), 1085–1095; A. G. Khachaturyan, Theory of Structural Transformations in Solids, Wiley, New York, 1983] diffuse interface or “phase-field” models [e. g. P. C. Hohenberg and B. I. Halperin, Theory of dynamic critical phenomena, Rev. Modern Phys. 49 (1977), 435–479; N. Provatas and K. Elder, Phase Field Methods in Material Science and Engineering, Wiley-VCH, 2010.] for solids are obtained. The current treatment is consistent with, and includes, previous works [e. g. O. Penrose and P. C. Fife, Thermodynamically consistent models of phase-field type for the kinetics of phase transitions, Phys. D 43 (1990), 44–62; O. Penrose and P. C. Fife, On the relation between the standard phase-field model and a “thermodynamically consistent” phase-field model. Phys. D 69 (1993), 107–113] on non-isothermal systems as a special case. In the context of no-flux boundary conditions, the SNET- and GENERIC-based approaches are shown to be completely consistent with each other and result in equivalent temperature evolution relations.

Onsager’s 1931 “reciprocity relations” result connects microscopic time reversibility with a symmetry property of corresponding macroscopic evolution equations. Among the many consequences is a variational characterization of the macroscopic evolution equation as a gradient-flow, steepest ascent, or maximal entropy production equation. Onsager’s original theorem is limited to close-to-equilibrium situations, with a Gaussian-invariant measure and a linear macroscopic evolution. In this paper, we generalize this result beyond these limitations and show how the microscopic time reversibility leads to natural generalized symmetry conditions, which take the form of generalized gradient flows.