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 ...

A long-standing law of thermodynamics turns out to have a loophole at the smallest scales. Researchers have shown that quantum engines made of correlated particles can exceed the traditional ...

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 ...

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 ...

A British engine manufacturing start-up is taking inspiration from a 200 year-old principle of thermodynamics to achieve a significant breakthrough in engine technology, one which promises a ...

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 ...

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” ...

“We’ve developed the world’s smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine, and found that the machine really does perform work,” said Clemens Bechinger, a physicist at the ...

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 ...