Related papers: Energy conversion theorems for some linear steady-…

We establish a theory of optimal efficiency and power for three-terminal thermoelectric engines which have two independent output electric currents and one input heat current. This set-up goes beyond the conventional heat engines with only…

Supercapacitors are increasingly used as energy storage elements. Unlike batteries, their state of charge has a considerable influence on their voltage in normal operation, allowing them to work from zero to their maximum voltage. In this…

The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…

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…

Thermostatics of CARNOT engines has been extended by more recent research based on endo-reversible model. Our model assumes exo-reversibility but endo-irreversibility to determine new upper-bound to thermomechanical conversion. We propose a…

There does not exist a general positive correlation between important life-supporting properties and the entropy production rate. The simple reason is that nondissipative and time-symmetric kinetic aspects are also relevant for establishing…

In systems described by the scattering theory, there is an upper bound, lower than Carnot, on the efficiency of steady-state heat to work conversion at a given output power. We show that interacting systems can overcome such bound and…

A possible solution to the observed baryon asymmetry in the universe is described, based on the physics of the standard model of electroweak interactions. At temperatures high enough electroweak physics provides violation of baryon number,…

Nonequilibrium processes break time-reversal symmetry and generate entropy. Living systems are driven out-of-equilibrium at the microscopic level of molecular motors that exploit chemical potential gradients to transduce free energy to…

In this paper, we demonstrate how the physics of entropy production, when combined with symmetry constraints, can be used for implementing high-performance and energy-efficient analog computing systems. At the core of the proposed framework…

Relationship among efficiency and output power of heat-electric energy converters as well as of any converters for transforming of heat energy into any other kind of energy is considered. It is shown, that the parameter efficiency does not…

In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in bringing a system from some initial distribution $p$…

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…

The bottleneck in modern thermoelectric power generation and cooling is the low energy conversion efficiency of thermoelectric materials. The detrimental effects of lattice phonons on performance can be mitigated, but achieving a high…

The optimization of the conversion of thermal energy into work and the minimization of dissipation for nano- and mesoscopic systems is a complex challenge because of the important role fluctuations play on the dynamics of small systems. We…

Entropy serves as a central observable in equilibrium thermodynamics. However, many biological and ecological systems operate far from thermal equilibrium. Here we show that entropy production can characterize the behavior of such…

The selection of an equilibrium state by maximising the entropy of a system, subject to certain constraints, is often powerfully motivated as an exercise in logical inference, a procedure where conclusions are reached on the basis of…

We study the performance of a three-terminal thermoelectric device such as heat engine and refrigerator with broken time-reversal symmetry by applying the unified trade-off figure of merit ($\dot{\Omega}$ criterion) which accounts for both…

The physical impossibility of heat transfer under isothermal conditions implies that the classical expression for the entropy of the ideal gas may not be compatible with the internal energy of the gas itself. A corrected expression of the…

The metriplectic formalism is useful for describing complete dynamical systems which conserve energy and produce entropy. This creates challenges for model reduction, as the elimination of high-frequency information will generally not…