Energy dissipation bounds for autonomous thermodynamic cycles.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32019890.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.1915676117 and PMC identifier 7035472.
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Abstract
How much free energy is irreversibly lost during a thermodynamic process? For deterministic protocols, lower bounds on energy dissipation arise from the thermodynamic friction associated with pushing a system out of equilibrium in finite time. Recent work has also bounded the cost of precisely moving a single degree of freedom. Using stochastic thermodynamics, we compute the total energy cost of an autonomously controlled system by considering both thermodynamic friction and the entropic cost of precisely directing a single control parameter. Our result suggests a challenge to the usual understanding of the adiabatic limit: Here, even infinitely slow protocols are energetically irreversible.