MODEL OF A WEAKLY NONLOCAL RELAXING COMPRESSIBLE MEDIUM

A model of a weakly non-local relaxing medium with viscous dispersion is considered. The relaxation kinetics are described by a Ginzburg-Landau /1/ equation which has been generalized to the case of a compressible medium. The special features of the propagation of planar acoustic waves in the medium are studied. The latter medium has an internal time scale which arises from the description of the relaxation kinetics and a spatial scale which characterizes the degree of the non-localness of the medium. General methods for constructing models of equilibrium non-local media have been developed in /2-5/. The generalization of these methods to the case of a relaxing medium enables one to describe the structure of a non-equilibrium phase discontinuity and to calculate the dissipation on the conversion front /6/.