Related papers: Power-Efficiency Constraint for Chemical Motors
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…
We study the energestics of a thermal motor driven by temperature differences, which consists of Brownian particles moving in a sawtooth potential with an external load where the viscous medium is alternately in contact with hot and cold…
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…
F$_{1}$-ATPase is a rotary molecular motor that \emph{in vivo} is subject to strong nonequilibrium driving forces. There is great interest in understanding the operational principles governing its high efficiency of free-energy…
We consider nano-sized artificial or biological machines working in steady state enforced by imposing non-equilibrium concentrations of solutes or by applying external forces, torques or electric fields. For unicyclic and strongly coupled…
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…
The Carnot cycle imposes a fundamental upper limit to the efficiency of a macroscopic motor operating between two thermal baths. However, this bound needs to be reinterpreted at microscopic scales, where molecular bio-motors and some…
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…
Brownian rotors play an important role in biological systems and in future nano-technological applications. However the mechanisms determining their dynamics, efficiency and performance remain to be characterized. Here the F0 portion of the…
Molecular motors drive mechanical motions utilizing the free energy liberated from chemical reactions such as ATP hydrolysis. Although it is essential to know the efficiency of this free energy transduction, it has been a challenge due to…
Like their larger micron-scale counterparts, {\AA}ngstr\"om-scale chemically self-propelled motors use asymmetric catalytic activity to produce self-generated concentration gradients that lead to directed motion. Unlike their micron-scale…
We investigate a model of a stochastic engine operating cyclically at constant bath temperature, which consists of an overdamped Brownian harmonic oscillator that plays the role of working substance and is elastically coupled to an active…
Classical thermodynamics aimed to quantify the efficiency of thermodynamic engines by bounding the maximal amount of mechanical energy produced compared to the amount of heat required. While this was accomplished early on, by Carnot and…
The efficiency at maximum power (EMP) for tight-coupling molecular motors is investigated within the framework of irreversible thermodynamics. It is found that the EMP depends merely on the constitutive relation between the thermodynamic…
Thermodynamics places a limit on the efficiency of heat engines, but not on their output power or on how the power and efficiency change with the engine's cycle time. In this manuscript, we develop a geometrical description of the power and…
Living systems at the molecular scale are composed of many constituents with strong and heterogeneous interactions, operating far from equilibrium, and subject to strong fluctuations. These conditions pose significant challenges to…
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.…
Several recent theories address the efficiency of a macroscopic thermodynamic motor at maximum power and question the so-called "Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency." Considering the entropy exchanges and productions in an n-sources motor, we…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
We investigate maximum efficiency at a given power for low-dissipation heat engines. Close to maximum power, the maximum gain in efficiency scales as a square root of relative loss in power and this scaling is universal for a broad class of…