About “costs” to keep a system far from unrestricted equilibrium with the environment

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine “costs”, that is, the entropy production rate on keeping a system in a given essergy level, depending on both the non-uniformity of internal intensive properties and the differences between the average values of these properties and the corresponding ones of the environment. “Relative entropy production” is shown to increase as the gradients imposed on the system increase.