Externally driven macroscopic systems: Dynamics versus Thermodynamics
  Experience collected in mesoscopic dynamic modeling of externally driven systems indicates absence of potentials that could play role of equilibrium or nonequilibrium thermodynamic potentials yet their thermo-dynamics-like modeling is often found to provide a good description, good understanding, and predictions that agree with results of experimental observations. This apparent contradiction is explained by noting that the dynamic and the thermodynamics-like investigations on a given mesoscopic level of description are not directly related. Their relation is indirect. They both represent two aspects of dynamic modeling on a more microscopic level of description. The thermodynamic analysis arises in the investigation of the way the more microscopic dynamics reduces to the mesoscopic dynamics (reducing dynamics) and the mesoscopic dynamic analysis in the investigation of the result of the reduction (reduced dynamics). 
Miroslav Grmela
cond-mat.stat-mech