2009/07/15 by Massimiliano Esposito, Katja Lindenberg, Christian Van den Broeck · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Branching (polymer chemistry) #Energy (signal processing) #Entropy (arrow of time) #Fluid Dynamics and Thin Films #Maximum power principle #Micro and Nano Robotics #Nonlinear system #Power (physics) #Principle of maximum entropy #Second law of thermodynamics #Thermodynamic free energy #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2010/01/p01008
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2010) P01008 · 6 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2009/07/15 · openalex publication_date 2010/01/14 · arxiv updated 2015/05/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We consider the efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the environment by the growth of a copolymer made of two constituent units in the entropy-driven regime. We show that the thermodynamic nonlinearity associated with the information processing aspect is responsible for a branching of the system properties such as power, speed of growth, entropy production, and efficiency, with varying affinity. The standard linear thermodynamics argument which predicts an efficiency of 1/2 at maximum power is inappropriate because the regime of maximum power is located either outside of the linear regime or on a separate bifurcated branch, and because the usual thermodynamic force is not the natural variable for this optimization.