Related papers: Carnot cycle for an oscillator
We report on the study of student difficulties regarding heat engine in the context of Stirling cycle within upper-division undergraduate thermal physics course. An in-class test about a Stirling engine with a regenerator was taken by three…
Carnot's theorem poses a fundamental limit on the maximum efficiency achievable from an engine that works between two reservoirs at thermal equilibrium. We extend this result to the case of arbitrary nonthermal stationary reservoirs, even…
The principle that heat spontaneously flows from higher temperature to lower temperature is a cornerstone of classical thermodynamics, often assumed to be independent of the sequence of interactions. While this holds true for macroscopic…
We investigate the efficiency of a quantum Carnot engine based on open quantum dynamics theory. The model includes time-dependent external fields for the subsystems controlling the isothermal and isentropic processes and for the…
The Carnot-like heat engines are classified into three types (normal-, sub- and super-dissipative) according to relations between the minimum irreversible entropy production in the "isothermal" processes and the time for completing those…
Uncovering whether strong system-bath coupling can be an advantageous operation resource for energy conversion can facilitate the development of efficient quantum heat engines (QHEs). Yet, a consensus on this ongoing debate is still lacking…
We study the optimization of the performance of arbitrary periodically driven thermal machines. Within the assumption of fast modulation of the driving parameters, we derive the optimal cycle that universally maximizes the extracted power…
We consider both Otto and Diesel heat engine cycles running upon the working substances modeled by the van der Waals fluid as a simple non-ideal gas model. We extensively perform the efficiency study in these model engines. Then we find…
We propose a theoretical model for a colloidal heat engine driven by a feedback protocol that is able to fully convert the net heat absorbed by the hot bath into extracted work. The feedback protocol, inspired by gambling strategies,…
Various quantum systems are considered as the working substance for the analysis of quantum heat cycles and quantum refrigerators. The ongoing technological challenge is how efficiently can a heat engine convert thermal energy to mechanical…
We consider the efficiency at maximum power of a quantum Otto engine, which uses a spin or a harmonic system as its working substance and works between two heat reservoirs at constant temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$ $ (<T_h)$. Although the…
We consider a quantum engine driven by repeated weak interactions with a heat bath of identical three-level atoms. This model was first introduced by Scully et al. [Science, 2003], who showed that coherence between the energy-degenerate…
The efficiency of macroscopic heat engines is restricted by the second law of thermodynamics. They can reach at most the efficiency of a Carnot engine. In contrast, heat currents in mesoscopic heat engines show fluctuations. Thus, there is…
We study a quantum Stirling cycle which extracts work using quantized energy levels of a potential well. The work and the efficiency of the engine depend on the length of the potential well, and the Carnot efficiency is approached in a low…
We analytically derive maximum efficiency at given cooling power for Carnot-type low-dissipation refrigerators. The corresponding optimal cycle duration depends on a single parameter, which is a specific combination of irreversibility…
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…
While strong system-bath coupling produces rich and interesting phenomena, applications to quantum thermal engines have been so far pointing mainly at detrimental effects. The delicate trade-off between efficiency loss due to strong…
In 1975, Courzon and Ahlborn studied a Carnot engine with thermal losses and got an expression for its efficiency that described better the performance of actual heat machines than the traditional result due to Carnot. In their original…
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…
In this work, we analyze an Otto-type cycle operating with a working substance composed of a quantum harmonic oscillator (QHO). Unlike other studies in which the work extraction is done by varying the frequency of the QHO and letting it…