A nonlocal phase-field model of Ginzburg-Landau-Korteweg fluids

A thermodynamic model of Korteweg fluids undergoing phase transition and/or phase separation is developed within the framework of weakly nonlocal thermodynamics. Compatibility with second law of thermodynamics is investigated by applying a generalized Liu procedure recently introduced in the literature. Possible forms of the free energy and of the stress tensor, which generalize some earlier ones proposed by several authors in the last decades, are carried out. Owing to the new procedure applied for exploiting the entropy principle, the thermodynamic potentials are allowed to depend on the whole set of variables spanning the state space, including the gradients of the unknown fields, without postulating neither the presence of an energy or entropy extra-flux, nor an additional balance law for microforce.