Related papers: A Classical Nernst Engine
Heat engines should ideally have large power output, operate close to Carnot efficiency and show constancy, i.e., exhibit only small fluctuations in this output. For steady-state heat engines, driven by a constant temperature difference…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
In traditional thermodynamics the Carnot cycle yields the ideal performance bound of heat engines and refrigerators. We propose and analyze a minimal model of a heat machine that can play a similar role in quantum regimes. The minimal model…
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…
We analyze the efficiency of thermal engines (either quantum or classical) working with a single heat reservoir like atmosphere. The engine first gets an energy intake, which can be done in arbitrary non-equilibrium way e.g. combustion of…
We investigate, in an analytical fashion, quantum Carnot cycles of a microscopic heat engine coupled to two nite heat reservoirs, whose internal cycles could own higher e ciency than the standard Carnot limit without consuming extra quantum…
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…
A cyclically operating chemical engine is considered that converts chemical energy into mechanical work. The working fluid is a gas of finite-sized spherical particles interacting through elastic hard collisions. For a generic transport law…
We study the energestics of a thermal motor driven by temperature differences, which consists of Brownian particles moving in a sawtooth potential with an external load where the viscous medium is alternately in contact with hot and cold…
Arguments based on symmetry and thermodynamics may suggest the existence of a ratchet-like lateral Casimir force between two plates at different temperatures and with broken inversion symmetry. We find that this is not sufficient, and at…
We study two-dimensional quantum Carnot engines of spherical symmetry by considering the case of a particle on the surface of a sphere of changing radius. The Carnot cycle is built allowing the state of the system to change with the…
We study the minimally nonlinear irreversible heat engines in which the time-reversal symmetry for the systems may b e broken. The expressions for the power and the efficiency are derived, in which the effects of the nonlinear terms due to…
We consider a class of quantum heat engines consisting of two subsystems interacting via a unitary transformation and coupled to two separate baths at different temperatures $T_h > T_c$. The purpose of the engine is to extract work due to…
Machines are only Carnot efficient if they are reversible, but then their power output is vanishingly small. Here we ask, what is the maximum efficiency of an irreversible device with finite power output? We use a nonlinear scattering…
The Carnot cycle is a prototype of ideal heat engine to draw mechanical energy from the heat flux between two thermal baths with the maximum efficiency, dubbed as the Carnot efficiency $\eta_{\mathrm{C}}$. Such efficiency can only be…
We study how to achieve the ultimate power in the simplest, yet non trivial, model of a thermal machine, namely a two-level quantum system coupled to two thermal baths. Without making any prior assumption on the protocol, via optimal…
Thermodynamics places a limit on the efficiency of heat engines, but not on their output power or on how the power and efficiency change with the engine's cycle time. In this manuscript, we develop a geometrical description of the power and…
Generation of electric power by the Nernst effect is a new application of a semiconductor. A key point of this proposal is to find materials with a high thermomagnetic figure-of-merit, which are called Nernst elements. In order to find…
We discuss the efficiency of a heat engine operating in a nonequilibrium steady state maintained by two heat reservoirs. Within the general framework of linear irreversible thermodynamics we derive a universal upper bound on the efficiency…
We investigate the efficiency of power generation by thermo-chemical engines. For strong coupling between the particle and heat flows and in the presence of a left-right symmetry in the system, we demonstrate that the efficiency at maximum…