Related papers: Heat engines at optimal power: Low-dissipation ver…
We investigate the performance of a microscopic quantum heat engine consisting of V- or Lambda-type emitters interacting collectively or independently when being in contact with environmental thermal reservoirs. Though the efficiency of a…
Considerable attention has been devoted to microscopic heat engines in both theoretical and experimental aspects. Notably, the fundamental limits pertaining to power and efficiency, as well as the tradeoff relations between these two…
All existing heat machines are dissipative open systems. Hence, they cannot operate fully coherently. We propose to replace this conventional thermodynamic paradigm by a completely different one, whereby heat machines are nonlinear coherent…
According to the laws of thermodynamics, no heat engine can beat the efficiency of a Carnot cycle. This efficiency traditionally comes with vanishing power output and practical designs, optimized for power, generally achieve far less.…
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…
Quantum heat engines are subjected to quantum fluctuations related to their discrete energy spectra. Such fluctuations question the reliable operation of quantum engines in the microscopic realm. We here realize an endoreversible quantum…
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…
We present a detailed thermodynamic analysis of a three-level quantum heat engine coupled continuously to hot and cold reservoirs. The system is driven by an oscillating external field and is described by the Markovian quantum master…
Starting with Carnot engine, the ideal efficiency of a heat engine has been associated with quasi-static transformations and vanishingly small output power. Here, we exactly calculate the thermodynamic properties of a isothermal heat…
Quantum coherence has been demonstrated in various systems including organic solar cells and solid state devices. In this letter, we report the lower and upper bounds for the performance of quantum heat engines determined by the efficiency…
We investigate the quantum thermodynamic cycle of a quantum heat engine carrying out an Otto thermodynamic cycle. We use the thermal properties of a moving heat bath with relativistic velocity with respect to the cold bath. As a working…
Efficiency at maximum power (EMP) is a very important specification for a heat engine to evaluate the capacity of outputting adequate power with high efficiency. It has been proved theoretically that the limit EMP of thermoelectric heat…
Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…
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 investigate non-equilibrium behavior of driven dissipative systems, using the model presented in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 240601 (2004)]. We solve the non-Boltzmann steady state energy distribution and the temporal evolution to it, and find…
Different economical configurations, due for instance to the relative cost of the fuel it consumes, can push a heat engine into operating whether at maximum efficiency or at maximum power produced. Any relevant design of such system hence…
For a general thermodynamic system described as a Markov process, we prove a general lower bound for dissipation in terms of the square of the heat current, thus establishing that nonvanishing current inevitably implies dissipation. This…
There are few exact results on optimal power conditions for a thermoelectric generator in the presence of both external and internal irreversibilities---modelled as non-ideal thermal contacts and Joule heating, respectively. Simplified…
Theoretical analysis, which maps single molecule time trajectories of a molecular motor onto unicyclic Markov processes, allows us to evaluate the heat dissipated from the motor and to elucidate its dependence on the mean velocity and…
We provide a consistent thermodynamic analysis of stochastic thermal engines driven by finite-size reservoirs, which are in turn coupled to infinite-size reservoirs. We consider a cyclic operation mode, where the working medium couples…