Friction in macroscopic thermodynamics: A kinetic point of view

To provide a solid support to a macroscopic framework developed to explicitly account for friction in thermodynamics, a kinetic description of frictional dissipation is developed. Using either a dissipative Fokker-Planck equation for Brownian motion or a Boltzmann equation with a friction-force term added, it is shown that both approaches lead to the emergence of the macroscopic thermodynamic relations that state the first and second laws with friction. The analysis is directly applied to the problem of determining the minimum amount of heating generated by memory erasure, known in computer science as Landauer's bound, and leads to a better understanding of the energetics behind the latter. A generalisation of Boltzmann's H theorem to include friction explicitly is also recovered, and the thermodynamics of granular rotators acted by a frictional torque and of radio-frequency (RF) current drive of fusion plasmas, in which collisional drag is present, are addressed as well. Various physics results are revisited employing the first and second laws with friction that have been derived from the appropriate dissipative kinetic equations, lower bounds for entropy production rates being derived both for granular rotators and for RF current drive.