Related papers: Adiabatic piston in a temperature gradient
We consider a heavy piston in an infinite cylinder surrounded by ideal gases on both sides. The piston moves under elastic collisions with gas atoms. We assume here that the gases always exert equal pressures on the piston, hence the piston…
The impossibility of separating into work and heat the energy transmitted between two subsystems through a movable piston is analyzed in this article. The process here described, although "quasi-static", is not reversible. It is shown that…
Some dynamical properties of non interacting particles in a bouncer model are described. They move under gravity experiencing collisions with a moving platform. The evolution to steady state is described in two cases for dissipative…
Microscopic thermal machines promise to play an important role in future quantum technologies. Making such devices widely applicable will require effective strategies to channel their output into easily accessible storage systems like…
We investigate the evolution of a system composed of $N$ non-interacting point particles of mass $m$ in a container divided into two chambers by a movable adiabatic piston of mass $M\gg m$. Using a two-time-scale perturbation approach in…
We consider the motion of two massive particles along a straight line. A lighter particle bounces back and forth between a heavier particle and a stationary wall, with all collisions being ideally elastic. It is known that if the lighter…
To the student of thermodynamics the most difficult subject is entropy. In this paper we examine the actual, practical application of entropy to two simple systems, the homogeneous slab with fixed boundary values of the temperature, and an…
The equilibrium conditions of a system consisting of a box with gas divided by a piston are revised. The apparent indetermination of the problem is solved by explicitly imposing the constancy of the internal energy when the Entropy Maximum…
The limit of small entropy production is reached in relaxing systems long after preparation, and in stationary driven systems in the limit of small driving power. Surprisingly, for extended systems this limit is not in general the…
In nature, objects which are in thermal contact with each other, usually approach the same temperature, unless a heat source (or sink) cherishes a persistent flow of heat. Accordingly, in a well-isolated apartment flat, most items are at a…
Thermodynamic transport phenomena in the system consisting of many hard-disks confined in a circular tube with a temperature difference are discussed. Here, temperatures on parts of the walls of the tube are imposed by stochastic boundary…
The plasma analog of an adiabatic lapse rate (or temperature variation with height) in atmospheric physics is obtained. A new source of plasma temperature gradient in a binary ion species mixture is found that is proportional to the…
The non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and kinetic theory for a model of a confined quasi-two-dimensional gas of inelastic hard spheres is presented. The dynamics of the particles includes an effective mechanism to transfer the energy…
We consider two spin-1/2 particles with isotropic Heisenberg interaction, as the working substance of a quantum heat engine. We observe a frictional effect on the adiabatic branches of the heat cycle, which arises due to an inhomogeneous…
Geometric phase of an open quantum system that is interacting with a thermal environment (bath) is studied through some simple examples. The system is considered to be a simple spin-half particle which is weakly coupled to the bath. It is…
An isolated mixture of smooth, inelastic hard spheres supports a homogeneous cooling state with different kinetic temperatures for each species. This phenomenon is explored here by molecular dynamics simulation of a two component fluid,…
The motion of an adiabatic piston under dry friction is investigated to clarify the roles of dry friction in non-equilibrium steady states. We clarify that dry friction can reverse the direction of the piston motion and causes a…
An adiabatic transition between two equilibrium states corresponding to different stiffnesses in an infinite chain of particles is studied. Initially, the chain particles have random displacements and random velocities corresponding to a…
We justify an applicability of the adiabatic perturbation theory for three well known systems with impacts: a ball between two slowly moving walls, a slowly irregular waveguide, and an adiabatic piston.
The adiabatic theorem is a fundamental result established in the early days of quantum mechanics, which states that a system can be kept arbitrarily close to the instantaneous ground state of its Hamiltonian if the latter varies in time…