A class of non-equilibrium models for compressible multi-component fluids in multi-dimensions is investigated taking into account viscosity and heat conduction. These models are subject to the choice of interfacial pressures and interfacial velocity as well as relaxation terms for velocity, pressure, temperature and chemical potentials. Sufficient conditions are derived for these quantities that ensure meaningful physical properties such as a non-negative entropy production, thermodynamical stability, Galilean invariance and mathematical properties such as hyperbolicity, subcharacteristic property and existence of an entropy-entropy flux pair. For the relaxation of chemical potentials, a two-component and a three-component models for vaporwater and gas-water-vapor, respectively, are considered.

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The exploitation of solar power for energy supply is of increasing importance. While technical development mainly takes place in the engineering disciplines, computer science offers adequate techniques for optimization. This work addresses the problem of finding an optimal heliostat field arrangement for a solar tower power plant. We propose a solution to this global, non-convex optimization problem by using an evolutionary algorithm. We show that the convergence rate of a conventional evolutionary algorithm is too slow, such that modifications of the recombination and mutation need to be tailored to the problem. This is achieved with a new genotype representation of the individuals. Experimental results show the applicability of our approach.

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