Related papers: Geometric characterization for cyclic heat engines…
We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…
The efficient conversion of thermal energy to mechanical work by a heat engine is an ongoing technological challenge. Since the pioneering work of Carnot, it is known that the efficiency of heat engines is bounded by a fundamental upper…
We study the efficiency of holographic heat engines in the context of extended black hole thermodynamics, where the cosmological constant becomes a dynamical variable. By taking the working substance as a static black hole (i.e. a…
The trade-off between large power output, high efficiency and small fluctuations in the operation of heat engines has recently received interest in the context of thermodynamic uncertainty relations (TURs). Here we provide a concrete…
The performance of a molecular motor, characterized by its power output and energy efficiency, is investigated in the motor design space spanned by the stepping rate function and the motor-track interaction potential. Analytic results and…
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…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…
We want to understand whether and to which extent the maximal (Carnot) efficiency for heat engines can be reached at a finite power. To this end we generalize the Carnot cycle so that it is not restricted to slow processes. We show that for…
We discuss the efficiency of a heat engine operating in a nonequilibrium steady state maintained by two heat reservoirs. Within the general framework of linear irreversible thermodynamics we derive a universal upper bound on the efficiency…
Understanding the fundamental limits of various energy conversion approaches is essential for assessing their efficiency and power output. In this work, we derive general performance bounds for thermoradiative heat engines that exchange…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
Quantum thermodynamics with microscopic inelastic scattering processes has been intensively investigated in recent years. Here, we apply quantum master equation combined with full counting statistics approach to investigate the role of…
Active matter constantly dissipates energy to power the self-propulsion of its microscopic constituents. This opens the door to designing innovative cyclic engines without any equilibrium equivalent. We offer a consistent thermodynamic…
The difference between quantum isoenergetic process and quantum isothermal process comes from the violation of the law of equipartition of energy in the quantum regime. To reveal an important physical meaning of this fact, here we study a…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…
The concepts of weighted reciprocal of temperature and weighted thermal flux are proposed for a heat engine operating between two heat baths and outputting mechanical work. With the aid of these two concepts, the generalized thermodynamic…
We consider a class of quantum heat engines consisting of two subsystems interacting via a unitary transformation and coupled to two separate baths at different temperatures $T_h > T_c$. The purpose of the engine is to extract work due to…
We study the performance of a quantum Otto cycle using a harmonic work medium and undergoing collisional dynamics with finite-size reservoirs. We span the dynamical regimes of the work strokes from strongly non-adiabatic to quasi-static…
Heat engines should ideally have large power output, operate close to Carnot efficiency and show constancy, i.e., exhibit only small fluctuations in this output. For steady-state heat engines, driven by a constant temperature difference…