2014/12/31 by Ramandeep S. Johal, Renuka Rai · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Advanced Thermoelectric Materials and Devices #Bounded function #Carnot cycle #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Sink (geography) #Thermodynamics #Universality (dynamical systems) #Upper and lower bounds #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/113/10006
published as Published version: EPL, 113 (1) 10006 (2016) · 11 pages, no figures. New discussion added on universality beyond linear response
arxiv created 2015/08/27 · openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · arxiv updated 2016/01/29 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We show the validity of some results of finite-time thermodynamics, also within the quasi-static framework of classical thermodynamics. First, we consider the efficiency at maximum work from finite source and sink modelled as identical thermodynamic systems. The near-equilibrium regime is characterized by expanding the internal energy up to second order ( i.e. up to linear response) in the difference of initial entropies of the source and the sink. It is shown that the efficiency is given by a universal expression , where is the Carnot efficiency. Then, different sizes of source and sink are treated, by combining different numbers of copies of the same thermodynamic system. The efficiency of this process is found to be , where the parameter γ depends only on the relative size of the source and the sink. This implies that within the linear response theory, is bounded as , where the upper (lower) bound is obtained with a sink much larger (smaller) in size than the source. We also remark on the behavior of the efficiency beyond linear response.