Temperature effects on the elastic properties of hysteretic elastic media: Modeling and simulations

Different materials with mesoscopic characteristics (e.g., defects or intergrain regions) have been shown to share a peculiar elastic behavior when subject to temperature variations. We present here a simple model based on the description of the mesoscopic features as bistate bond regions that connect elastic portions described by the traditional Landau thermoelastic theory. We apply our model to simulate resonance frequency experiments in order to analyze the effects of temperature changes on the elastic properties of materials and reproduce part of the phenomenology observed concerning the conditioning effect and the recovery of the system to its original state after a thermal shock.