Understanding Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics: foundations, applications, frontiers (Springer 2008)

This book offers a homogeneous presentation of the many faces of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The first part is devoted to a description of the nowadays thermodynamic formalism recognized as the classical theory of non-equilibrium processes. This part of the book may serve as a basis to an introductory course dedicated to first-year graduate students in sciences and engineering.

The classical description can however not be complete, as it rests on the hypothesis of local equilibrium. This has fostered the development of many theories going beyond local equilibrium and which cannot be put aside. The second part of the book is concerned with these different approaches, and will be of special interest for PhD students and researchers. For the sake of homogeneity, the authors have used the general structure and methods presented in the first part. Indeed, besides their differences, all these formalisms are not closed boxes but present some overlappings and parallelisms which are emphasized in this book. For pedagogical reasons, some problems have been analysed within the different formalisms to underline their differences and their convergences.