The Thermodynamics of Elastic Materials with Heat Conduction and Viscosity

Abstract

The basic physical concepts of classical continuum mechanics are body, configuration of a body, and force system acting on a body. In a formal rational development of the subject, one first tries to state precisely what mathematical entities represent these physical concepts: a body is regarded to be a smooth manifold whose elements are the material points; a configuration is defined as a mapping of the body into a three-dimensional Euclidean space, and a force system is defined to be a vector-valued function defined for pairs of bodies¹. Once these concepts are made precise one can proceed to the statement of general principles, such as the principle of objectivity or the law of balance of linear momentum, and to the statement of specific constitutive assumptions, such as the assertion that a force system can be resolved into body forces with a mass density and contact forces with a surface density, or the assertion that the contact forces at a material point depend on certain local properties of the configuration at the point. While the general principles are the same for all work in classical continuum mechanics, the constitutive assumptions vary with the application in mind and serve to define the material under consideration.