Energy Dissipation Bounds for Autonomous Thermodynamic Cycles
Statistical Mechanics
2021-03-26 v2 Biological Physics
Abstract
How much free energy is irreversibly lost during a thermodynamic process? For deterministic protocols, lower bounds on energy dissipation arise from the thermodynamic friction associated with pushing a system out of equilibrium in finite time. Recent work has also bounded the cost of precisely moving a single degree of freedom. Using stochastic thermodynamics, we compute the total energy cost of an autonomously controlled system by considering both thermodynamic friction and the entropic cost of precisely directing a single control parameter. Our result suggests a challenge to the usual understanding of the adiabatic limit: here, even infinitely slow protocols are energetically irreversible.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.06780,
title = {Energy Dissipation Bounds for Autonomous Thermodynamic Cycles},
author = {Samuel J. Bryant and Benjamin B. Machta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06780},
year = {2021}
}