Contributed by world-renowned specialists on the occasion of Paul Germain's 80th birthday, this unique book reflects the foundational works and the intellectual influence of this author. It presents the realm of modern thermomechanics with its extraordinary wealth of applications to the behaviour of materials, whether solid or fluid. The thirty-one contributions follow an easygoing autobiographical sketch by Paul Germain, and highlight the power and richness of a methodological approach to the phenomenology of many materials. This approach combines harmoniously thermodynamics and continuum theory in order to provide exploitable, thermodynamically admissible models of a large variety of behaviours and phenomena, including those of diffusion, thermoelasticity, viscoplasticity, relaxation, hysteresis, wetting, shape-memory effects, growth, phase transitions, stability, fracture, shocks, machining of materials, microstructured solids, complex fluids, etc.
Especially aimed at graduate students, researchers, and engineers in mechanical engineering and materials science, this book also presents the state of the art in an active field of research and opens new horizons in other scientific fields, such as applied mathematics and applied physics, because of the intellectual satisfaction and remarkable efficiency provided by the advocated approach.