Related papers: Identifying Student Difficulties with Entropy, Hea…
We report on the study of student difficulties regarding heat engine in the context of Stirling cycle within upper-division undergraduate thermal physics course. An in-class test about a Stirling engine with a regenerator was taken by three…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…
A diagram that represents both conservation of energy and constancy of entropy in Carnot cycle.
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
From thermodynamics point of view, in this era of aiming at energy conservation and sustainability, we need to develop more accurate ways to design thermal power, cooling and heat pump cycles. It has been the general practice in…
In this paper the analogy between a thermal engine and a waterwheel is developed in details, showing that the analogous of the flow of water in an hydraulic engine is the flow of entropy in a thermal one. This analogy mat serve to analyse…
We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more…
From an entropy-based formulation of the first law of thermodynamics in the quantum regime, we investigate the performance of Otto-like and Carnot-like engines for a single-qubit working medium. Within this framework, the first law includes…
The efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound. This bound follows from the second law of thermodynamics and is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the…
An interesting question to explore in physics classes is whether gravity violates the second law of thermodynamics. Standard physics textbooks provide little to no discussion of the relationship between entropy and gravity, and the same is…
We describe a study on the conceptual difficulties faced by college students in understanding hydrodynamics of ideal fluids. This study was based on responses obtained in hundreds of written exams and oral interviews, which were held with…
We present a thermodynamics experiment suitable for first year undergraduate students employing Stirling Engines to create a demonstration of energy transformation and to measure the mechanical efficiency of such engines. Using an…
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…
In this work we analyze the deviations of reversible cycles (for both heat engines and refrigerators) from the corresponding Carnot cycle operating between the same extreme temperatures and deviations of irreversible cycles from its…
In this article we discuss a model used to introduce the concept of entropy with secondary school students. It can be used to discuss with students the reversibility of time, the tendency towards homogeneity and the link between probability…
According to classical Boltzmannian thermodynamics, the efficiency of a cyclic machine is strictly lower than one. Such a result is a straightforward consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics. Recent advances in the study of the…
Evidence implies that basic laws of thermodynamics must be tested by experiments. In this paper, an experiment is designed to measure the entropy of a system with at least one known (measurable) equation of state, especially the gas…