Related papers: Optimizing the classical heat engine

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…

For a general thermodynamic system described as a Markov process, we prove a general lower bound for dissipation in terms of the square of the heat current, thus establishing that nonvanishing current inevitably implies dissipation. This…

Real quantum heat engines lack the separation of time and length scales that is characteristic for classical engines. They must be understood as open quantum systems in non-equilibrium with time-controlled coupling to thermal reservoirs as…

On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…

There are many exotic thermodynamic processes that are hard to study in nature. Here, we synthesize a structured environment to explore the extremes of thermodynamics. We present an engine running at extreme temperatures of above ten…

Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy…

We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…

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…

The heat flow between a quantum system and its reservoir is analyzed when initially both are in a separable thermal state and asymptotically approach a correlated equilibrium. General findings are illustrated for specific systems and…

We consider stationary driven systems in contact with a thermal equilibrium bath. There is a constant (Joule) heat dissipated from the steady system to the environment as long as all parameters are unchanged. As a natural generalization…

The constraint relation for efficiency and power is crucial to design optimal heat engines operating within finite time. We find a universal constraint between efficiency and output power for heat engines operating in the low-dissipation…

Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…

Free energy fixes the maximum work of a thermodynamic process once the state and Hamiltonian are specified. A work-extraction task asks a different question: how much average work can a single device realize across several preparations and…

We study the optimal performance of Carnot-like heat engines working in low dissipation regime using the product of the efficiency and the power output, also known as the efficient power, as our objective function. Efficient power function…

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…

We consider measurement based single temperature quantum heat engine without feedback control, introduced recently by Yi, Talkner and Kim [Phys. Rev. E 96, 022108 (2017)]. Taking the working medium of the engine to be a one-dimensional…

We introduce heat engines working in the nano-regime that allow to extract a finite amount of deterministic work. We show that the efficiency of these cycles is strictly smaller than Carnot's, and we associate this difference with a…

We propose a generalized model of a heat engine and calculate the minimum and maximum bounds on the efficiency at maximum power. We obtain a universal form of generalized extreme bounds on the efficiency at maximum power. Our model unifies…

Under a general framework, shortcuts to adiabatic processes are shown to be possible in classical systems. We then study the distribution function of the work done on a small system initially prepared at thermal equilibrium. It is found…

We introduce an alternative route for obtaining reliable cyclic engines, based on interacting Brownian particles under time-periodic drivings. General expressions for the thermodynamic fluxes, such as power and heat, are obtained using the…