Related papers: A one dimensional hard-point gas as a thermoelectr…
A cyclic thermodynamic heat engine runs most efficiently if it is reversible. Carnot constructed such a reversible heat engine by combining adiabatic and isothermal processes for a system containing an ideal gas. Here, we present an example…
Thermoelectric semiconducting materials are often evaluated by their figure-of-merit, zT. However, by using zT as the metric for showing improvements, it is not immediately clear whether the improvement is from an enhancement of the…
The multi-terminal generalization of the steady-state density functional theory for the description of electronic and thermal transport (iq-DFT) is presented. The linear response regime of the framework is developed leading to exact…
We demonstrate how to incorporate a catalyst to enhance the performance of a heat engine. Specifically, we analyze efficiency in one of the simplest engines models, which operates in only two strokes and comprises of a pair of two-level…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…
We study thermoelectric properties of inhomogeneous nanogranular materials for weak tunneling conductance between the grains, g_t < 1. We calculate the thermopower and figure of merit taking into account the shift of the chemical potential…
The efficiency of energy conversion in thermoelectric generators (TEGs) is directly proportional to electrical conductivity and Seebeck coefficient while inversely to thermal conductivity. The challenge is to optimize these interdependent…
We construct an entangled quantum Otto engine based on spin-1/2 systems undergoing Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) interaction within a varying magnetic field. We investigate the influence of the DM interaction on basic thermodynamic quantities,…
One-dimensional systems, such as nanowires or electrons moving along strong magnetic field lines, have peculiar thermalization physics. The binary collision of point-like particles, typically the dominant process for reaching thermal…
We consider both Otto and Diesel heat engine cycles running upon the working substances modeled by the van der Waals fluid as a simple non-ideal gas model. We extensively perform the efficiency study in these model engines. Then we find…
A theoretical thermodynamic cycle more efficient than an infinite set of Carnot engines is presented. This result is unexpected from the point of view of classical thermodynamics.
Black holes are arguably the most extreme regions of the universe. Yet, they are also utterly inaccessible to experimentation, and even just indirect observation poses significant technical challenges. The phenomenological approach of…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…
We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…
We compare two approaches to the construction of the thermodynamics of a one-dimensional periodic system of spinless point bosons: the Yang--Yang approach and a new approach proposed by the author. In the latter, the elementary excitations…
In this paper, we analyze the operation of an Otto cycle heat machine driven by a non-interacting two-dimensional electron gas on a twisted geometry. We show that due to both the energy quantization on this structure and the adiabatic…
We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…
Based on quantum thermodynamic processes, we make a quantum-mechanical (QM) extension of the typical heat engine cycles, such as the Carnot, Brayton, Otto, and Diesel cycles, etc. The temperature is not included in these QM engine cycles,…
Thermoelectric efficiency is defined as the ratio of power delivered to the load of a device to the rate of heat flow from the source. Till date, it has been studied in presence of thermodynamic constraints set by the Onsager reciprocal…
The performance of endoreversible thermal machines operating at finite power constitutes one of the main challenges of nonequilibrium classical and quantum thermodynamics, engineering and others. We introduce the idea of adjusting the…