Issue |
EPL
Volume 128, Number 5, December 2019
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 50004 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | General | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/128/50004 | |
Published online | 31 January 2020 |
Efficiency of a two-stage heat engine at optimal power
Department of Physical Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali Sector 81, S. A. S. Nagar, Manauli PO 140306, Punjab, India
Received: 10 September 2019
Accepted: 17 December 2019
We propose a two-stage heat cycle for an optimized linear irreversible heat engine. In the first stage, the heat engine works between the hot reservoir and a finite-sized sink. In the second stage, it works between the finite-sized heat source and cold reservoir. Under the tight-coupling condition, the engine shows the low-dissipation behavior in each stage, i.e., the entropy generated depends inversely on the duration of the process. The phenomenological dissipation constants are determined within the theory itself in terms of the heat transfer coefficients and the heat capacity of the auxiliary system. We study the efficiency at maximum power and highlight a class of efficiencies in the symmetric case that show universality up to second order in Carnot efficiency, while the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency is obtained as the lower bound for this class.
PACS: 05.70.Ln – Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics / 05.20.-y – Classical statistical mechanics / 05.70.-a – Thermodynamics
© EPLA, 2020
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.