DOES THE LOCAL ENTROPY BALANCE EQUATION DESCRIBE IRREVERSIBLE-PROCESSES

A standard derivation is given for the equation of local entropy balan ce in the phenomenological thermodynamics of irreversible processes on the basis of the locally equilibrium formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Attention is drawn to the fact that entropy is then a local function of the state of a nonequilibrium system and therefore cannot contain an irreversibly increasing contribution. Through an ana lysis of Boltzmann's kinetic equation, which describes the nonequilibr ium behavior of a mixture of monatomic rarefied gases, it is shown tha t die local entropy balance equation in standard form can be derived s olely when one uses an incorrectly defined local entropy.