相关论文: Water, air and fire at work in Hero's machines
In this paper the analogy between a thermal engine and a waterwheel is developed in details, showing that the analogous of the flow of water in an hydraulic engine is the flow of entropy in a thermal one. This analogy mat serve to analyse…
Robert Stirling's patent for what was essentially a new type of engine to create work from heat was submitted in 1816. Its reception was underwhelming and although the idea was sporadically developed, it was eclipsed by the steam engine…
This study is based on Roman wooden force pumps. It appears that they were used in small numbers to raise water from wells, and more commonly as portable pumps to fight fires. The force pump is attributed to Ctesibius of Alexandria (fl.…
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,…
Creation of devices and mechanisms which help people has a long history. Their inventors always targeted practical goals such as irrigation, harvesting, devices for construction sites, measurement, and, last but not least, military tasks…
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 present work is a translation from french to english of our previous \g{D\'emocrite et la puissance motrice du feu}, amended on a number of respects. It is mainly of historical and pedagogical interest. We suggest that the concepts…
Earth's atmosphere operates a steam cycle in which water vapor evaporates from the surface, expands, condenses, and returns as precipitation. The Clausius-Clapeyron law relates the incremental expansion work of saturated water vapor to…
Of the three basic states of matter, liquid is perhaps the most complex. While its flow properties are described by fluid mechanics, its thermodynamic properties are often neglected, and for many years it was widely believed that a general…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…
Humans can easily describe, imagine, and, crucially, predict a wide variety of behaviors of liquids--splashing, squirting, gushing, sloshing, soaking, dripping, draining, trickling, pooling, and pouring--despite tremendous variability in…
Engines are systems and devices that convert one form of energy into another, typically into a more useful form that can perform work. In the classical setup, physical, chemical, and biological engines largely involve the conversion of heat…
In De Impressionibus Elementorum, a treatise written by Grosseteste shortly after 1220, we can find a discussion of some phenomena involving the four classical elements (air, water, fire and earth), in the framework of an Aristotelian…
Thermoacoustic oscillations have been one of the most exciting discoveries of the physics of fluids in the 19th century. Since its inception, scientists have formulated a comprehensive theoretical explanation of the basic phenomenon which…
We present a comprehensive theory of heat engines (HE) based on a quantum-mechanical "working fluid" (WF) with periodically-modulated energy levels. The theory is valid for any periodicity of driving Hamiltonians that commute with…
2019 is the bicentenary of George Gabriel Stokes, who in 1851 described the drag - Stokes drag - on a body moving immersed in a fluid, and 2020 is the centenary of Christopher Robin Milne, for whom the game of poohsticks was invented; his…
The topic of microscopic heat engine has undergone intensive research in recent years. Microscopic heat engines can exploit thermal as well as active fluctuations to extract thermodynamic work. We investigate the properties of a microscopic…
Painting is a fluid mechanical process. The action of covering a solid surface with a layer of a viscous fluid is one of the most common human activities; virtually all man-made surfaces are painted to provide protection against the…
The Fluidyne is a two-part hot-air engine, which has the peculiarity that both its power piston and displacer are liquids. Both parts operate in tandem with the common working gas (air) transferring energy from the displacer to the piston…
Greek mythology supplies fundamental physics with the names of numerous (100+) experiments, machines, codes, and phenomena. I present the central narrative of Greek mythos via these names. Hyperlinks are provided for their physics…