  In this paper, we analyze a PDE system arising in the modeling of phase
transition and damage phenomena in thermoviscoelastic materials. The resulting
evolution equations in the unknowns \theta (absolute temperature), u
(displacement), and \chi (phase/damage parameter) are strongly nonlinearly
coupled. Moreover, the momentum equation for u contains \chi-dependent elliptic
operators, which degenerate at the pure phases (corresponding to the values
\chi=0 and \chi=1), making the whole system degenerate. That is why, we have to
resort to a suitable weak solvability notion for the analysis of the problem:
it consists of the weak formulations of the heat and momentum equation, and,
for the phase/damage parameter \chi, of a generalization of the principle of
virtual powers, partially mutuated from the theory of rate-independent damage
processes. To prove an existence result for this weak formulation, an
approximating problem is introduced, where the elliptic degeneracy of the
displacement equation is ruled out: in the framework of damage models, this
corresponds to allowing for partial damage only. For such an approximate
system, global-in-time existence and well-posedness results are established in
various cases. Then, the passage to the limit to the degenerate system is
performed via suitable variational techniques.
