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” ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the basic truths learned in college thermodynamics courses is that no heat-activated cycle can be devised that is more efficient than a Carnot cycle operating between the same temperature ...

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 ...

Power boost: a quantum heat engine in synthetic diamond. (Courtesy: Jonas Becker) Physicists have in recent years built a number of microscopic heat engines to investigate how the laws of ...

ON p. 326 of NATURE for August 29 appears an abstract of a paper by Dr. J. S. Haldane, which he read before the Institution of Mining Engineers on June 16. In this paper he has “thrown to the winds” ...