“…The generalized forces and conjugate fluxes associated with the triple junction are obtained in terms of the asymmetric dihedral angles and the specific Gibbs free energies related to the void surface layer and the grain boundary, respectively. The entropy production associated with the virtual displacement of ordinary points, which is directly utilized without proof in our previous paper (Ogurtani and Oren, 2001), is also derived as a special or degenerate case of the singular point treatment. The contribution of the strain energy density to the generalized forces and the conjugated fluxes are analyzed rigorously by the first-order decomposition of the generalized Gibbs free energy density, which is an extension of the Lord KelvinÕs and GibbsÕs approaches to the stress tensor dependence of entropy density (Fung, 1965), at constant temperature and composition.…”