In the celebrated paper on the reciprocal relation for the kinetic coefficients in irreversible processes, Onsager extended Rayleigh's principle of the least energy dissipation to general irreversible processes. In this presentation, I shall show that this variational principle is very convenient in considering the non-linear and non-equilibrium phenomena in soft matter. I will discuss this using the examples of (i) viscoelasticity of colloidal suspensions and polymer solutions, (ii)diffusion-mechanical coupling in polymer solutions and gels, and (iii) nemato-hydrodynamics etc.
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