Molecular kinetic analysis of a finite-time Carnot cycle

Y. Izumida; K. Okuda

doi:10.1209/0295-5075/83/60003

All issues

Volume 83 / No 6 (September 2008)

EPL, 83 6 (2008) 60003

Abstract

Issue		EPL Volume 83, Number 6, September 2008


Article Number		60003
Number of page(s)		6
Section		General
DOI		https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/83/60003
Published online		08 September 2008

EPL, 83 (2008) 60003

Molecular kinetic analysis of a finite-time Carnot cycle

Y. Izumida and K. Okuda

Division of Physics, Hokkaido University - Sapporo 060-0810, Japan

Corresponding authors: izumida@statphys.sci.hokudai.ac.jp okuda@statphys.sci.hokudai.ac.jp

Received: 25 February 2008
Accepted: 25 July 2008

Abstract

We study the efficiency at the maximal power $\eta _{{\rm max}}$ of a finite-time Carnot cycle of a weakly interacting gas which we can regard as a nearly ideal gas. In several systems interacting with the hot and cold reservoirs of the temperatures $T_{{\rm h}}$ and $T_{{\rm c}}$ , respectively, it is known that $\eta_\mathrm{max}=1-\sqrt{{T_\mathrm{c}}/{T_\mathrm{h}}}$ , which is often called the Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency $\eta _{{\rm CA}}$ . For the first time numerical experiments to verify the validity of $\eta _{{\rm CA}}$ are performed by means of molecular dynamics simulations and reveal that our $\eta _{{\rm max}}$ does not always agree with $\eta _{{\rm CA}}$ , but approaches $\eta _{{\rm CA}}$ in the limit of $T_{{\rm c}}\rightarrow T_{{\rm h}}$ . Our molecular kinetic analysis explains the above facts theoretically by using only elementary arithmetic.

PACS: 05.70.Ln – Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics

© EPLA, 2008

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