In recent years the use of new complex and very performing materials has became common in engineering and physical applications as well as in the border sciences as biophysics and biomechanics. In all these cases the presence of a complex, often multi-scale objects are involved and the need for accurate temperature description is no more fulfilled by classical thermodynamics. In this regard, several authors begun to use non-local version of the transport equations in terms of integral models [1] and [2] or, alternatively, by the introduction of gradients of the state variables in the transport equations. These approaches are very similar to the integral and gradient models of non-local elasticity [3]. Indeed the main drawbacks of these models relies in the lack of physical picture associated to long-range thermal energy transport showing, consequently, severe drawbacks in the positions of Neumann boundary conditions for all the applications where the Kapitza effect is significant affecting the temperature distribution due to phonon propagations away from thermal sources [4].
Very recently a new, non-local model of thermal energy transport in rigid bodies with a precise physical description of the thermal energy exchange has been proposed in the context of fractional-order non-local thermodynamics [5]. The basic idea beyond the long-range thermal energy transport is that the scale of heat propagation among non-adjacent locations of the solid is different of order of magnitudes by the thermal energy exchange among adjacent locations of the body. The long-range transport among non-adjacent location of the body is assumed proportional to the relative temperatures among the exchanging portions of the body, to the product of their interacting masses and to a proper distance-decaying function that accounts for the strength of thermal exchanges among locations x and y. As a power-law with real exponent is chosen, it has been proved that, in 1D case, the temperature equation involves the so-called Marchaud fractional derivative of order α ∈