Related papers: Lost work and exergy: two views of the same concep…

We discussed the criterion for usefully comparing an irreversible cycle with a reversible one, and show that the lost work cannot be determined by the usual cycle diagrams, contrary to what has been found in the literature. To better…

We present the relatively less known thermodynamic concept of exergy in the context of ecology and sustainability. To this end, we first very briefly outline thermodynamics as it arose historically via engineering studies. This enables us…

Exergy, or availability, is a thermodynamic concept representing the useful work that can be extracted from a system evolving from a given state to a reference state. It is also a system metric, formulated from the first and the second law…

The available enthalpy is an early form of the modern thermodynamic concept of exergy, which is the generic name for the amount of work obtainable when some matter is brought to a state of equilibrium with its surroundings by means of…

Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…

Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that…

Exergy represents the maximum useful work possible when a system at a specific state reaches equilibrium with the environmental dead state at temperature To. Correspondingly, the exergy difference between two states is the maximum work…

The physical foundations of a variety of emerging technologies --- ranging from the applications of quantum entanglement in quantum information to the applications of nonequilibrium bulk and interface phenomena in microfluidics, biology,…

Entropy production quantifies the amount of irreversibility of a physical process, leading to fundamental bounds for thermodynamic quantities. It captures the inability to run a physical system forward and then backward, bringing it to the…

A restricted form of Landauer's Principle, independent of computational considerations, is shown to hold for thermal systems by reference to the joint entropy associated with conjugate observables. It is shown that the source of the…

The entropy production is commonly interpreted as measuring the distance from equilibrium. However, this explanation lacks a rigorous description due to the absence of a natural equilibrium measure. The present analysis formalizes this…

We discuss the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by a change in a control parameter and undergoing a unitary process. We compare the work actually done on the system with the one that would be performed…

The relationship between the intrinsic motion of gravity, light, and time is explored in terms of the principles of entropy, causality, energy, and symmetry conservation. A conceptual mechanism for gravity and the gravitational connection…

It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…

1. Strong and weak notions of erasure are distinguished according to whether the single erasure procedure does or does not leave the environment in the same state independently of the pre-erasure state. 2. Purely thermodynamic…

Exergy is a very important thermodynamic quantity in several fields such as economy, engineering, ecology and yet it has attracted little attention in pure physics. One of the main problems of the currently used definition of exergy is its…

Exergy is a thermodynamic quantity useful to obtain information on the work from any process. The analyses of irreversibility are important in the designing and development of the productive processes for the economic growth, but they play…

There is a relation between the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes as expressed by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, and the entropy production in such processes. We explain on an elementary mathematical level the relations…

Current research in statistical mechanics mostly concerns the investigation of out-of-equilibrium, irreversible processes, which are ubiquitous in nature and still far from being theoretically understood. Even the precise characterization…

The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…