Rational Continua, Classical and New

This book is a tribute to Gianfranco Capriz on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. This book collects about twenty research papers written by world-leading scientists in the field of continuum thermomechanics. The authors discuss a number of different theories, classical and new. Moreover, general underlying themes are both the exploration of the limits of the continuum approach (as it was consolidated between the late '50s and the early '70s) and the study of those amendments and extensions that would hopefully allow to treat mathematically a host of real-life problems that have been proposed, but not yet adequately modelled, within materials science, structural optimisation, biosciences, medical engineering, superconductivity, etc. The reader will find displayed the recent progresses in modelling non-standard material structures.