Related papers: Equilibrium Chemical Engines
We derive general trade-off relations among the power, efficiency, and constancy for two-terminal thermoelectric systems in the linear response regime. Constancy, which quantifies the steadiness of the heat engine, is measured by its…
A spatio-temporal evolution of chemicals appearing in a reversible enzyme reaction and modelled by a four component reaction-diffusion system with the reaction terms obtained by the law of mass action is considered. The large time behaviour…
Sequential (or collisional) engines have been put forward as an alternative candidate for the realisation of reliable engine setups. Despite this, the role of the different stages and the influence of the intermediate reservoirs is not well…
A quantum engine with n qubits performing thermodynamic cycles with two thermal reservoirs is presented. While such constructions have been aplenty, here we show the existence of what we term as "limit cycle" at a purely quantum level of…
The widely debated feasibility of thermodynamic machines achieving Carnot efficiency at finite power has been convincingly dismissed. Yet, the common wisdom that efficiency can only be optimal in the limit of infinitely-slow processes…
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,…
We consider quantum heat engines that operate between nonequilibrium stationary reservoirs. We evaluate their maximum efficiency from the positivity of the entropy production and show that it can be expressed in terms of an effective…
Molecular machines transduce free energy between different forms throughout all living organisms. While truly machines in their own right, unlike their macroscopic counterparts molecular machines are characterized by stochastic…
We analyze the efficiency of thermal engines (either quantum or classical) working with a single heat reservoir like atmosphere. The engine first gets an energy intake, which can be done in arbitrary non-equilibrium way e.g. combustion of…
Recently, a formal analogy between the fluctuating diffusivity and thermodynamics has been proposed based on phenomena of heterogeneous diffusion observed in living cells. This not only offers the analogs of the quantity of heat and work as…
Molecular motors convert chemical energy into mechanical work while operating in an environment dominated by Brownian motion. The aim of this paper is to explore the flow of energy between the molecular motors and its surroundings, in…
Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…
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…
Starting with Carnot engine, the ideal efficiency of a heat engine has been associated with quasi-static transformations and vanishingly small output power. Here, we exactly calculate the thermodynamic properties of a isothermal heat…
Chemical reaction systems operating in nonequilibrium open-system states arise in a great number of contexts, including the study of living organisms, in which chemical reactions, in general, are far from equilibrium. Here we introduce a…
We present a realistic implementation of a quantum engine powered by a phaseonium gas of coherently prepared three-level atoms -- where quantum coherence acts as a thermodynamic resource. Using a collision model framework for…
Molecular machines consist of either a single protein or a macromolecular complex composed of protein and RNA molecules. Just like their macroscopic counterparts, each of these nano-machines has an engine that "transduces" input energy into…
Adiabatic (or reversible) processes are the key concept unifying our understanding of thermodynamics and dynamical systems. Reversibility in the thermodynamic sense is understood as entropy-preserving processes, such as in the idealized…
We propose a simple classical dynamical model of a thermoelectric (or thermochemical) heat engine based on a pair of ideal gas containers connected by two unequal scattering channels. The model is solved analytically and it is shown that a…
From the steam engine to current nano-devices, the design of efficient thermal machines has been instrumental in modern societies. In its essence a thermal engine can be thought as a working substance, in contact with two or more baths,…