Rational thermodynamics

Summary

Rational thermodynamics is an axiomatic approach to the thermodynamics of continuous media, developed in the 1960s by Coleman, Noll, Truesdell and others. It takes temperature and entropy as primitive fields, even far from equilibrium, and does not assume local equilibrium. The second law enters as the Clausius–Duhem inequality, which every admissible process must satisfy. This requirement restricts the possible constitutive equations of a material, through the Coleman–Noll procedure.