Related papers: A thermodynamic cycle for the solar cell
Engineering Thermodynamics has been the core course of many science and engineering majors at home and abroad, including energy and power, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace, cryogenic refrigeration, food engineering,…
Solar water splitting provides a promising path for sustainable hydrogen production and solar energy storage. One of the greatest challenges towards large-scale utilization of this technology is reducing the hydrogen production cost. The…
Heat engines transform thermal energy into useful work, operating in a cyclic manner. For centuries, they have played a key role in industrial and technological development. Historically, only gases and liquids have been used as working…
Calculations are made of the energy supplied to the solar wind by the rapid decay of density fluctuations, identified as ion acoustic waves. It is shown that this process supplies an appreciable fraction, perhaps nearly all, of the observed…
The cytosol state in living cell is treated as homogeneous phase equilibrium with a special feature: the pressure of one phase is positive and the pressure of the other is negative. From this point of view the cytosol is neither solution…
We investigate a model of a stochastic engine operating cyclically at constant bath temperature, which consists of an overdamped Brownian harmonic oscillator that plays the role of working substance and is elastically coupled to an active…
Hot carrier solar cells allow potential efficiency close to the thermodynamical limit in ideal conditions. However, the feasability of such devices has not been clearly stated so far and only ideal cells were considered in previous studies.…
It is shown that a heat energy can be transformed in an electric energy of direct current by the use of an inhomogeneous superconducting ring. This trasformation is possible both at an iterative change of temperature and at an unaltered…
The hot carrier solar cell (HCSC) has the potential for converting solar energy into electrochemical energy with an efficiency of 85.4%. For this, in addition to an idealized light absorber, the HCSC has to be connected to the external load…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
We show that under rather general assumptions on the form of the entropy function, the energy balance equation for a system in thermodynamic equilibrium is equivalent to a set of nonlinear equations of hydrodynamic type. This set of…
We analyze a steady-state thermoelectric engine, whose working substance consists of two capacitively coupled quantum dots. One dot is tunnel-coupled to a hot reservoir serving as a heat source, the other one to two electrically biased…
The conversion of heat into current can be obtained by a process with two stages. In the first one, the heat is used for distilling a solution and obtaining two flows with different concentrations. In the second stage, the two flows are…
Non-planar solar-cell devices have been promoted as a means to enhance current collection in absorber materials with charge-transport limitations. This work presents an analytical framework for assessing the ultimate performance of…
In steady state, the fuel cycle of a fusion plasma requires inward particle fluxes of fuel ions. These particle flows are also accompanied by heating. In the case of classical transport in a rotating cylindrical plasma, this heating can…
The realization of microscopic heat engines has gained a surge of research interest in statistical physics, soft matter, and biological physics. A typical microscopic heat engine employs a colloidal particle trapped in a confining…
Heat engines are fundamental physical objects to develop nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The thermodynamic performance of the heat engine is determined by the choice of cycle and time-dependence of parameters. Here, we propose a systematic…
Perovskites are promising next-generation absorber materials for low-cost and high-efficiency solar cells. Although perovskite cells are configured similar to the classical solar cells, their operation is unique and requires development of…
We propose a simple theoretical model for a molecular chemical engine that catalyzes a chemical reaction and converts the free energy released by the reaction into mechanical work. Binding and unbinding processes of reactant and product…
A numerical model is built, simulating the principles of kinetic gas theory, to predict pressures of molecules in a spherical pressure vessel; the model tracks a single particle and multiplies the force on the spherical walls by a mole of…