Free energy and domain of dependence for weakly compressible viscoelastic fluids

Abstract

We study the linear behavior of a weakly compressible viscoelastic fluid. Within an approximate theory of thermodynamics, compatible with the model, we construct the maximal free energy $\psi_M$ that is shown to induce a ``natural" norm $\Vert\cdot\Vert_M$ on the space state for such a fluid. Successively, since the stress $\mathbf{T}$ turns out to be continuous with respect to $\Vert\cdot\Vert_M$, we employ $\psi_M$ to obtain some stability and domain of dependence results.