Related papers: Optimisation of an active heat engine
Low-temperature-differential (LTD) Stirling heat engines are able to operate with a small temperature difference between low-temperature heat reservoirs that exist in our daily lives, and thus they are considered to be an important…
We propose a quantum Otto cycle based on the properties of a two-level system in a realistic out-of-thermal-equilibrium electromagnetic field acting as its sole reservoir. This steady configuration is produced without the need of active…
We study the efficiency of a simple quantum dot heat engine at maximum power. In contrast to the quasi-statically operated Carnot engine whose efficiency reaches the theoretical maximum, recent research on more realistic engines operated in…
We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…
We study microscopic engines that use a single active particle as their "working medium". Part of the energy required to drive the directed motion of the particle can be recovered as work, even at constant temperature. A wide class of…
We propose an embedding of standard active particle models in terms of two-temperature processes. One temperature refers to an ambient thermal bath, and the other temperature effectively describes ``hot spots,'' i.e., systems with few…
We investigate a kinetic heat engine model constituted by particles enclosed in a box where one side acts as a thermostat and the opposite side is a piston exerting a given pressure. Pressure and temperature are varied in a cyclical…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities become non-negligible and play an important role when the system size is small. We develop finite-time thermodynamics of fluctuations in microscopic heat engines whose environmental temperature 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…
We present a general framework for determining the power-efficiency trade-off relations across arbitrary thermal machines, addressing the lack of unified optimization results stemming from their diverse functionalities (e.g., heat engines,…
We study the efficiency at the maximal power $\eta_\mathrm{max}$ of a finite-time Carnot cycle of a weakly interacting gas which we can reagard as a nearly ideal gas. In several systems interacting with the hot and cold reservoirs of the…
We develop a generic model for a cyclic quantum heat engine that makes it possible to coherently amplify a periodically modulated input signal without the need to couple the working medium to multiple reservoirs at the same time. Instead,…
The concept of effective temperatures in nonequilibrium systems is studied within an exactly solvable model of non-Markovian diffusion. The system is coupled to two heat baths which are kept at different temperatures: one ('fast') bath…
We consider a three-stroke engine in the microscopic regime, where the working body of the engine is composed of a two-level system. The working body of the engine aims to withdraw heat from the hot heat bath, generate work, and discharge…
Cyclical heat engines are a paradigm of classical thermodynamics, but are impractical for miniaturization because they rely on moving parts. A more recent concept is particle-exchange (PE) heat engines, which uses energy filtering to…
We explore signatures of a topological phase transition (TPT) in the work and efficiency of a quantum heat engine, which uses a single layer topological insulator, stanene, in an external electric field as a working substance. The magnitude…
Application of thermodynamics to driven systems is discussed. As particular examples, simple traffic flow models are considered. On a microscopic level, traffic flow is described by Bando's optimal velocity model in terms of accelerating…
A thermal current, generated by a temperature gradient between two reservoirs coupled to a carefully designed photonic or (micro-) electromechanical circuit, might induce non-conservative forces that impulse a mechanical degree of freedom…
We use the general formulation of irreversible thermodynamics and study the minimally nonlinear irreversible model of heat engines operating between a time-varying hot heat source of finite size and a cold heat reservoir of infinite size.…
We investigate the performance of an underdamped stochastic heat engine for a time-dependent harmonic oscillator. We analytically determine the optimal protocol that maximizes the efficiency at fixed power. The maximum efficiency reduces to…