Second Law and its Amendment: the Axiom of No-reversible Directions -- Revisited

Abstract

A toy-model is used for describing the steps achieving the no-reversible-direction axiom in a tutorial manner: i) choice of a state space results in the balance equations on state space which are linear in the process directions, ii) a reversible process direction cannot be generated by combination of non-reversible ones, iii) process directions which are in the kernel of the balance equations do not enter the entropy production. The Coleman-Mizel formulation of the second law and the Liu relations follow immediately.