Dirac structures in nonequilibrium thermodynamics

Dirac structures are geometric objects that generalize both Poisson structures and presymplectic structures on manifolds. They naturally appear in the formulation of constrained mechanical systems. In this paper, we show that the evolution equations for nonequilibrium thermodynamics admit an intrinsic formulation in terms of Dirac structures, both on the Lagrangian and the Hamiltonian settings. In the absence of irreversible processes, these Dirac structures reduce to canonical Dirac structures associated with canonical symplectic forms on phase spaces. Our geometric formulation of nonequilibrium thermodynamic thus consistently extends the geometric formulation of mechanics, to which it reduces in the absence of irreversible processes. The Dirac structures are associated with the variational formulation of nonequilibrium thermodynamics developed in the work of Gay-Balmaz and Yoshimura, J. Geom. Phys. 111, 169–193 (2017a) and are induced from a nonlinear nonholonomic constraint given by the expression of t...