Related papers: Heat Flow and Efficiency in a Microscopic Engine
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…
We investigate fluctuations of output work for a class of Stirling heat engines with working fluid composed of interacting units and compare these fluctuations to an average work output. In particular, we focus on engine performance close…
We study a genuine Brownian motor by hard disk molecular dynamics and calculate analytically its properties, including its drift speed and thermal conductivity, from microscopic theory.
We present a formalism to study the heat transport and the power developed by the local driving fields on a quantum system coupled to macroscopic reservoirs. We show that, quite generally, two important mechanisms can take place: (i)…
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,…
With spintronics applications in mind, we use irreversible thermodynamics to derive the rates of entropy production and heating near an interface when heat current, electric current, and spin current cross it. Associated with these currents…
We investigate the thermodynamic efficiency of sub-micro-scale heat engines operating under the conditions described by over-damped stochastic thermodynamics. We prove that at maximum power the efficiency obeys for constant isotropic…
In Markovian dynamics with the local detailed balance condition, we decompose the total entropy production rate into microscopic transitions. By applying this decomposition to the heat to work conversion process, we rigorously show that the…
Producing useful electrical work in consuming chemical energy, the fuel cell have to reject heat to its surrounding. However, as it occurs for any other type of engine, this thermal energy cannot be exchanged in an isothermal way in finite…
In this paper, we examine the power and efficiency of the thermionic device utilizing the Nernst effect, with a specific focus on its potential application as an engine. The device operates by utilizing the vertical heat current to generate…
A quantum dot driven by two ac gate potentials oscillating with a phase lag may be regarded as a quantum engine, where energy is transported and dissipated in the form of heat. In this chapter we introduce a microscopic model for a quantum…
The difference between quantum isoenergetic process and quantum isothermal process comes from the violation of the law of equipartition of energy in the quantum regime. To reveal an important physical meaning of this fact, here we study a…
Stochastic heat engines are devices that generate work from random thermal motion using a small number of highly fluctuating degrees of freedom. Proposals for such devices have existed for more than a century and include the Maxwell demon…
We present a detailed thermodynamic analysis of a three-level quantum heat engine coupled continuously to hot and cold reservoirs. The system is driven by an oscillating external field and is described by the Markovian quantum master…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
Classically, the power generated by an ideal thermal machine cannot be larger than the Carnot limit. This profound result is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics. A hot question is whether this bound is still valid for microengines…
The characterization and control of quantum effects in the performance of thermodynamic tasks may open new avenues for small thermal machines working in the nanoscale. We study the impact of coherence in the energy basis in the operation of…
We study the performance of a quantum Otto cycle using a harmonic work medium and undergoing collisional dynamics with finite-size reservoirs. We span the dynamical regimes of the work strokes from strongly non-adiabatic to quasi-static…
Thermodynamics of nanoscale devices is an active area of research. Despite their noisy surrounding they often produce mechanical work (e.g. micro-heat engines), display rectified Brownian motion (e.g. molecular motors). This invokes…
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…