RESUMO
At the molecular level fluid motions are, by first principles, described by time reversible laws. On the other hand, the coarse grained macroscopic evolution is suitably described by the Navier-Stokes equations, which are inherently irreversible, due to the dissipation term. Here, a reversible version of three-dimensional Navier-Stokes is studied, by introducing a fluctuating viscosity constructed in such a way that enstrophy is conserved, along the lines of the paradigm of microcanonical versus canonical treatment in equilibrium statistical mechanics. Through systematic simulations we attack two important questions: (a) What are the conditions that must be satisfied in order to have a statistical equivalence between the two nonequilibrium ensembles? (b) What is the empirical distribution of the fluctuating viscosity observed by changing the Reynolds number and the number of modes used in the discretization of the evolution equation? The latter point is important also to establish regularity conditions for the reversible equations. We find that the probability to observe negative values of the fluctuating viscosity becomes very quickly extremely small when increasing the effective Reynolds number of the flow in the fully resolved hydrodynamical regime, at difference from what was observed previously.
RESUMO
A chaotic system under periodic forcing can develop a periodically visited strange attractor. We discuss simple models in which the phenomenon, quite easy to see in numerical simulations, can be completely studied analytically.
RESUMO
Entropy creation rate is introduced for a system interacting with thermostats (i.e., for a system subject to internal conservative forces interacting with "external" thermostats via conservative forces) and a fluctuation theorem for it is proved. As an application, a time scale is introduced, to be interpreted as the time over which irreversibility becomes manifest in a process leading from an initial to a final stationary state of a mechanical system in a general nonequilibrium context. The time scale is evaluated in a few examples, including the classical Joule-Thompson process (gas expansion in a vacuum).
RESUMO
In transformations between nonequilibrium stationary states, entropy might not be a well defined concept. It might be analogous to the "heat content" in transformations in equilibrium which is not well defined either, if they are not isochoric (i.e., do involve mechanical work). Hence we conjecture that in a nonequilibrium stationary state the entropy is just a quantity that can be transferred or created, such as heat in equilibrium, but has no physical meaning as "entropy content" as a property of the system.
