TY - JOUR TI - Construction of a variational formulation for heat transfer AU - Liu Hong-Yan AU - Jiang Juan-Fen JN - Thermal Science PY - 2016 VL - 20 IS - 3 SP - 889 EP - 892 PT - Article AB - This paper gives two useful methods to construct a variational formulation for heat transfer. Xu's variational principle for heat transfer in terms of entransy is used as an example to elucidate how to correct a wrong variational formulation, and the semi-inverse method is adopted to establish a needed variational principle.