This book is a unique presentation of thermodynamic methods of construction of continuous models. It is based on a uniform approach following from the entropy inequality and using Lagrange multipliers as auxiliary quantities in its evaluation. It covers a wide range of models - ideal gases, thermoviscoelastic fluids, thermoelastic and thermoviscoelastic solids, plastic polycrystals, miscible and immiscible mixtures, and many others. The structure of phenomenological thermodynamics is justified by a systematic derivation from the Liouville equation, through the BBGKY-hierarchy-derived Boltzmann |