Related papers: A simple model for Carnot heat engines
The Carnot heat engine sets an upper bound on the efficiency of a heat engine. As an ideal, reversible engine, a single cycle must be performed in infinite time, and so the Carnot engine has zero power. However, there is nothing in…
Heat engines extract work by running cyclically between two heat reservoirs. When the two reservoirs are thermal and at different temperatures, the maximum efficiency of the engine is given by the Carnot limit. Here we consider a quantum…
The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…
Carnot's theorem poses a fundamental limit on the maximum efficiency achievable from an engine that works between two reservoirs at thermal equilibrium. We extend this result to the case of arbitrary nonthermal stationary reservoirs, even…
The efficient conversion of thermal energy to mechanical work by a heat engine is an ongoing technological challenge. Since the pioneering work of Carnot, it is known that the efficiency of heat engines is bounded by a fundamental upper…
A dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
Nanotechnology has not only provided us the possibility of developing quantum machines but also noncanonical power sources able to drive them. Here we focus on studying the performance of quantum machines driven by arbitrary combinations of…
We investigate stochastic thermodynamics of a two-particles Langevin system. Each particle is in contact with a heat bath at different temperatures $T_1$ and $T_2~(<T_1)$, respectively. Particles are trapped by a harmonic potential and…
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
We demonstrate that the system composed of a gyrotropic particle out of thermal equilibrium with vacuum can be regarded as a heat engine. Such a particle, initially at rest, will experience a fluctuation-induced torque and start to rotate,…
We derive the law of entropy non-decrease directly from the Kelvin-Planck principle for simple and compound systems without using the Clausius inequality. A key of the derivation is a new formulation of entropy in terms of work by a Carnot…
We propose the minimally nonlinear irreversible heat engine as a new general theoretical model to study the efficiency at the maximum power $\eta^*$ of heat engines operating between the hot heat reservoir at the temperature $T_h$ and the…
In this work we include, for the Carnot cycle, irreversibilities of linear finite rate of heat transferences between the heat engine and its reservoirs, heat leak between the reservoirs and internal dissipations of the working fluid. A…
We consider a system model of a general finite-state machine (ratchet) that simultaneously interacts with three kinds of reservoirs: a heat reservoir, a work reservoir, and an information reservoir, the latter being taken to be a running…
We consider quantum heat engines that operate between nonequilibrium stationary reservoirs. We evaluate their maximum efficiency from the positivity of the entropy production and show that it can be expressed in terms of an effective…
A heat engine operating in the one-shot finite-size regime, where systems composed of a small number of quantum particles interact with hot and cold baths and are restricted to one-shot measurements, delivers fluctuating work. Further,…
In this work, we analyze an Otto-type cycle operating with a working substance composed of a quantum harmonic oscillator (QHO). Unlike other studies in which the work extraction is done by varying the frequency of the QHO and letting it…
We present the exact theory of quantum engines whose working medium is a network of driven oscillators performing an arbitrary cyclic process while coupled to thermal and nonthermal reservoirs. We show that when coupled to a single…
A novel formalism, called H-theory, is applied to the problem of statistical equilibrium of a hierarchical complex system with multiple time and length scales. In this approach, the system is formally treated as being composed of a small…