Elevated temperatures and extreme temperature gradients arise in a large variety of engineering problems, and often produced thermal stresses and thermal deformations that crucially affect the life of the materials and the systems involved. Early examples arose with the advent of high-speed rocket-powered flight and the development of nuclear energy sources. More recent applications can be found in fields ranging from reentry heating and ablation in space flight to the localized heat generation in computer chips, produced by high temperature during fabrication and by high current density...