A study published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) details a "Gambling Carnot Engine" that researchers report can attain 100% efficiency while also improving power generation. The researchers present ...

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 ...

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 ...

When French engineer Sadi Carnot calculated the maximum efficiency of a heat engine in 1824, he had no idea what heat was. In those days, physicists thought heat was a fluid called caloric. But Carnot ...

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 ...

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 at Rice University have found a new way to improve a key element of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems, which convert heat into electricity via light. Using an unconventional approach ...

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 ...

Rudolf Diesel and his Rational Engine The inventor of the Diesel engine hoped it would attain the ideal of the Carnot cycle for the heat engine. He failed, but today his engine provides most of the ...