Related papers: Carnot efficiency is reachable in an irreversible …
A new universality in optimization of trade-off between power and efficiency for low-dissipation Carnot cycles is presented. It is shown that any trade-off measure expressible in terms of efficiency and the ratio of power to its maximum…
Aiming to explore physical limits of wind turbines, we develop a model for determining the work extractable from a compressible fluid flow. The model employs conservation of mass, energy and entropy and leads to a universal bound for the…
The efficiency at maximum power has been investigated extensively, yet the practical control scheme to achieve it remains elusive. We fill such gap with a stepwise Carnot-like cycle, which consists the discrete isothermal process (DIP) and…
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…
We study a thermal engine model for which Newton's cooling law is obeyed during heat transfer processes. The thermal efficiency and its bounds at maximum output power are derived and discussed. This model, though quite simple, can be…
We study the statistics of the efficiency in a class of isothermal cyclic machines with realistic coupling between the internal degrees of freedom. We derive, under fairly general assumptions, the probability distribution function for the…
We investigate fluctuations of output work for a class of Stirling heat engines with working fluid composed of interacting units and compare these fluctuations to an average work output. In particular, we focus on engine performance close…
Recent advances in experimental control of colloidal systems have spurred a revolution in the production of mesoscale thermodynamic devices. Functional "textbook" engines, such as the Stirling and Carnot cycles, have been produced in…
Thermoelectric generators are particularly suitable to investigate the irreversible processes which govern the coupled transport of matter and heat in solid-state systems. We study the efficiency at maximum power in the strong coupling…
The derivation of the efficiency of Carnot cycle is usually done by calculating the heats involved in two isothermal processes and making use of the associated adiabatic relation for a given working substance's equation of state, usually…
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…
We examine the efficiency of an effective two-terminal thermoelectric device under broken time-reversal symmetry. The setup is derived from a three-terminal thermoelectric device comprising a thermal terminal and two electronic contacts,…
We present results obtained by using nonlinear irreversible models for heat devices. In particular, we focus on the global performance characteristics, the maximum efficiency and the efficiency at maximum power regimes for heat engines, and…
It was reported that, if and only if the specific heat, correlation length, and dynamical exponents $\alpha, \nu$ and $z$, fulfill the condition $\alpha-z\nu>0$, the phase transitions can enable a quantum heat engine to approach Carnot…
We present a unified perspective on nonequilibrium heat engines by generalizing nonlinear irreversible thermodynamics. For tight-coupling heat engines, a generic constitutive relation of nonlinear response accurate up to the quadratic order…
We formulate the power-efficiency constraint of Carnot-like heat engines as a geometric optimization problem in the plane of normalized branch dissipations. Efficiency contours are straight lines in this plane, so maximizing efficiency at…
We demonstrate that the system composed of a gyrotropic particle out of thermal equilibrium with vacuum can be regarded as a heat engine. Such a particle, initially at rest, will experience a fluctuation-induced torque and start to rotate,…
We study the energetics of isothermal ratchets which are driven by a chemical reaction between two states and operate in contact with a single heat bath of constant temperature. We discuss generic aspects of energy transduction such as…
We consider the optimization of a finite-time Carnot engine characterized by small dissipations. We bound the power with a simple inequality and show that the optimal strategy is to perform small cycles around a given working point, which…
Thermodynamic gas power cycles achieving Carnot efficiency require isothermal expansion, which is associated with slow processes and results in negligible power output. This study proposes a practical method for rapid near-isothermal gas…