On the Carnot efficiency and the 2nd law of thermodynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A review is carried out on the general applicability of the Carnot efficiency of conversion of heat to work in a cycling engine. It is found that the expression for the calculation of such efficiency is correct when applied to cycles where the waste or unused heat from the engine is transferred outside the cycle in each and every cycle. In other words, for such engine, an entirely new amount of heat must be supplied in each and every cycle. If we call such cycle as a Carnot cycle, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is its most logical consequence whereby the efficiency of conversion of heat to work can never exceed the Carnot efficiency. Since the 2nd law of thermodynamics has the status of a law of physics, any attempt to question its validity or define its limitations is considered to be useless. Indeed, the present study confirms that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a law of physics for the Carnot cycle, as defined above. If one considers a cycle where the waste heat is not transferred outside the cycle, but is recovered, recirculated, and re-used, one finds that the Carnot efficiency is a lower limit for higher efficiencies. The thermodynamic conditions required for a cycle to have the waste heat recovered, recirculated, and re-used are found from elementary analysis, and their validity are confirmed from numerical simulation and a proof-of-principle experiment. The consequences of such finding in terms of world yearly energy saving and climate change mitigation are highlighted.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".