Almost exactly 200 years ago, French physicist Sadi Carnot determined the maximum efficiency of heat engines. The Carnot ...

The efficiency of an heat engine is traditionally defined as the ratio of its average output work over its average input heat. Its highest possible value was discovered by Carnot in 1824 and is a ...

(Nanowerk News) Harnessing quantum states that avoid thermalization enables energy harvesters to surpass traditional thermodynamic limits such as Carnot efficiency, report researchers from Japan. The ...

For more than a century, thermodynamics has described how heat flows and engines run, while quantum mechanics has ruled the ...

(Editor’s Note: This story originally ran in November 2008 and has proved a perennial favorite of Power Engineering readers. With the New Year we thought we’d share it again. Click here to see the ...

Physicists have created a device that has experimentally exceeded the conventional second law of thermodynamics. The device is an information engine, which converts information into work, and it is ...

An American research team developed the new formula by applying to bifacial cells the Shockley-Queisser triangle, which is used to calculate the maximum theoretical efficiency of a monofacial solar ...

The race is on to claim the title of "most efficient coal-fired power plant" on the planet. However, it’s tricky identifying finalists because of the widespread misuse of the term "efficiency" and all ...