  In this paper, we cast damped Timoshenko and damped Bresse systems into a
general framework for non-equilibrium thermodynamics, namely the GENERIC
(General Equation for Non-Equilibrium Reversible-Irreversible Coupling)
framework. The main ingredients of GENERIC consist of five building blocks: a
state space, a Poisson operator, a dissipative operator, an energy functional,
and an entropy functional. The GENERIC formulation of damped Timoshenko and
damped Bresse systems brings several benefits. First, it provides alternative
ways to derive thermodynamically consistent models of these systems by
construct- ing building blocks instead of invoking conservation laws and
constitutive relations. Second, it reveals clear physical and geometrical
structures of these systems, e.g., the role of the energy and the entropy as
the driving forces for the reversible and irreversible dynamics respectively.
Third, it allows us to introduce a new GENERIC model for damped Timoshenko
systems that is not existing in the literature.
