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Despite its historical importance, a perfect gas enclosed by a pistons and in contact with a thermal reservoirs is a system still largely under study. Its thermodynamic properties are not yet well understood when driven under…
Collective effects have attracted remarkable recent interest, not only for their presence in several systems in nature but also for the possibility of being used for the construction of efficient engine setups. Notwithstanding, little is…
Conventional heat-engine models typically assume two heat reservoirs at fixed temperatures. In contrast, radioisotope power systems introduce a fundamentally different paradigm in which the hot sources supply heat at a constant generation…
On the assumption that experimentally validated tabulated thermodynamic properties of saturated fluids published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are accurate, a theoretical thermodynamic cycle can be demonstrated that…
Thermal machines perform useful tasks--such as producing work, cooling, or heating--by exchanging energy, and possibly additional conserved quantities such as particles, with reservoirs. Here we consider thermal machines that perform more…
Recent theoretical and experimental studies in quantum heat engines show that, in the quasi-static regime, it is possible to have higher efficiency than the limit imposed by Carnot, provided that engineered reservoirs are used. The…
The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…
Improvement of thermoelectric systems in terms of performance and range of applications relies on progress in materials science and optimization of device operation. In this chapter, we focuse on optimization by taking into account the…
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…
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…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
We introduce and analyze a class of heat engines composed of interacting units, in which the thermal reservoir is associated with the neighborhood surrounding each unit. These systems can be mapped onto stochastic opinion models and are…
We present a geometric formalism for the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a small system coupled to external isothermal reservoirs as an application of Thouless pumping, where the electrochemical potentials of the reservoirs and parameters…
The study of thermal heat engines was pivotal to establishing the principles of equilibrium thermodynamics, with implications far wider than only engine optimization. For nonequilibrium systems, which by definition dissipate energy even at…
The second law of thermodynamics can be described as the non-decreasing of the entropy in the irreversible thermodynamic process. Such phenomenon can be quantitatively evaluated with the irreversible entropy generation (IEG), which was…
We study the modification of the second law of thermodynamics for a quantum system interacting with a reservoir regarding quantum coherence. The whole system is isolated so that neither energy nor information is lost. It is discovered that…
We have performed an extensive analysis of a single particle stochastic heat engine constructed by manipulating a Brownian particle in a time dependent harmonic potential. The cycle consists of two isothermal steps at different temperatures…
Sequential (or collisional) engines have been put forward as an alternative candidate for the realisation of reliable engine setups. Despite this, the role of the different stages and the influence of the intermediate reservoirs is not well…
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…
We adopt a geometric approach to describe the performance of adiabatic quantum machines, operating under slow time-dependent driving and in contact to two or more reservoirs with a temperature bias during all the cycle. We show that the…