Heat engines are ubiquitous as they lie at the core of cars, aircraft, refrigerators, power plants and miniature motors. But they are currently limited by Carnot's maximum efficiency rule, according ...

One famous limit of thermodynamics is that heat engines, like steam engines and internal combustion engines, must be less efficient than a Carnot heat engine (a heat engine cycle designed by French ...

IN a paper on Carnot's Cycle and the Efficiency of Heat Engines, reported in NATURE, August 29, Dr. J. S. Haldane comes to the astonishing conclusion that “the Carnot cycle is radically in efficient” ...

Researchers have shown that the effi ciency at maximum power of a quantum Otto engine can be dramatically enhanced by coupling it to a squeezed thermal reservoir. While standard heat engines interact ...

Tabletop experiments by Indian physicists have broken a barrier proposed 200 years ago by a legendary French engineer, Sadi Carnot, raising hopes of new high-efficiency heat engines hitherto ...

Thermoelectrics using nanostructures offers the potential of getting very close to the carnot limit of efficiency using very light weight systems for convert heat to electricity. Early versions of ...

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) have cracked an age-old thermodynamic puzzle by devising a novel micro heat ...

Physicists in the Netherlands have built a heat engine that might be the tiniest ever created. Based on “piezoresistive” silicon, and smaller than a typical biological cell, the engine could find ...

Scientists are working on a heat engine that consists of just a single ion. Such a nano-heat engine could be far more efficient than, for example, a car engine or a coal-fired power plant. Scientists ...

Just how small can you make an engine? Two researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Valentin Blickle and Clemens Bechinger, successfully ...