Second law violations, continuum mechanics, and permeability

The violations of the second law are relevant as the length and/or time scales become very small. The second law then needs to be replaced by the fluctuation theorem and mathematically, the irreversible entropy is a submartingale. First, we discuss the consequences of these results for the axioms of continuum mechanics, arguing in favor of a framework relying on stochastic functionals of energy and entropy. We next determine a Lyapunov function for diffusion-type problems governed by stochastic rather than deterministic functionals of internal energy and entropy, where the random field coefficients of diffusion are not required to satisfy the positive definiteness everywhere. Next, a formulation of micropolar fluid mechanics is developed, accounting for the lack of symmetry of stress tensor on molecular scales. This framework is then applied to employed to show that spontaneous random fluctuations of the microrotation field will arise in Couette—and Poiseuille-type flows in the absence of random (turbulence-like) fluctuations of the classical velocity field. Finally, while the permeability is classically modeled by the Darcy law or its modifications, besides considering the violations of the second law, one also needs to account for the spatial randomness of the channel network, implying a modification of the hierarchy of scale-dependent bounds on the macroscopic property of the network.