"Professor Ericksen has drawn on his experience in research on solids to devise a series of lectures for graduate students from various departments at the University of Minnesota. The aim is to introduce and illustrate uses of various important ideas with analysis that can be done using elementary mathematics."--BOOK JACKET.

"Often, important applications involve using the thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. In part, this involves a strategy for designing experiments to determine equations of state. Simple strategies are discussed for thermoelastic bars and an ideal gas-solid mixture. A simple strategy can fail when instabilities are encountered.

Illustrative examples of thermodynamic stability theory include rudimentary analysis of cold-drawing in polymers, Martensitic transformations in plates, instabilities in rubber balloons and sheets, peeling tapes, breaking bars, buckling of beams, and instabilities produced by electromagnetic fields in liquid crystals."--BOOK JACKET.

"Nonequilibrium theory is illustrated by heat conduction in rigid and deformable bars, including a fairly common way of using the Clausium-Duhem inequality to get thermodynamic restrictions on constitutive equations. Also covered is elementary one-dimensional theory of shock waves and slower-moving phase boundaries. Drawing on all these experiences, the final chapter treats general ideas in a more abstract way.

Included here are discussions of both some of the real difficulties encountered in trying to apply thermodynamics to particular phenomena, for example, plasticity and viscoelasticity, and of differences of opinions of experts as to what should be considered to be the basic laws. The author has also included exercises in the revised edition."--BOOK JACKET.