The authors warmly thank to K. Gröger and A. Mielke for many fruitful discussions. A.P. was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the project C18 "Analysis and numerics of multidimensional models for elastic phase transformation in a shape-memory alloys" of the Research Center MATHEON. Moreover, L.P. wishes to thank for the kind hospitality of WIAS. Abstract We consider viscoelastic solids undergoing thermal expansion and exhibiting hysteresis effects due to plasticity or

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... e transformations. Within the framework of generalized standard solids, the problem is described in a 3D setting by the momentum equilibrium equation, the flow rule describing the dependence of the stress on the strain history, and the heat transfer equation. Under appropriate regularity assumptions on the data, a local existence result for this thermodynamically consistent system is established, by combining existence results for ordinary differential equations in Banach spaces with a fixed-point argument. Then global estimates are obtained by using both the classical energy estimate and more specific techniques for the heat equation introduced by Boccardo and Gallouët. Finally a global existence result is derived.