Variational updates for general thermo–chemo–mechanical processes of inelastic solids

The variational formulation of coupled mechanical problems has many advantages from the theoretical point of view and also guides the design of numerical methods that have attractive features such as symmetric tangents. In the current work we propose a novel variational principle for three-field, strongly coupled problems involving (inelastic, finite strain) mechanics, thermal transport, and mass diffusion. To obtain this result, it is key to...