This book is dedicated to the recent developments in RET with the aim to
explore polyatomic gas, dense gas and mixture of gases in
non-equilibrium. In particular we present the theory of dense gases with
14 fields, which reduces to the Navier-Stokes Fourier classical theory
in the parabolic limit. Molecular RET with an arbitrary number of
field-variables for polyatomic gases is also discussed and the theory is
proved to be perfectly compatible with the kinetic theory in which the
distribution function depends on an extra variable that takes into
account a molecule's internal degrees of freedom. Recent results on
mixtures of gases with multi-temperature are presented together with a
natural definition of the average temperature. The qualitative analysis
and in particular, the existence of the global smooth solution and the
convergence to equilibrium are also studied by taking into account the
fact that the differential systems are symmetric hyperbolic.
Applications to shock and sound waves are analyzed together with light
scattering and heat conduction and the results are compared with
experimental data.
Rational extended thermodynamics (RET) is a thermodynamic theory that is
applicable to non-equilibrium phenomena. It is described by differential
hyperbolic systems of balance laws with local constitutive equations. As
RET has been strictly related to the kinetic theory through the closure
method of moment hierarchy associated to the Boltzmann equation, the
applicability range of the theory has been restricted within rarefied
monatomic gases.
The book represents a valuable resource for applied mathematicians,
physicists and engineers, offering powerful models for potential
applications like satellites reentering the atmosphere, semiconductors
and nano-scale phenomena.
