Performance of a quantum heat engine cycle working with harmonic oscillator systems (Q2372551)

The authors presented in this paper a quantum irreversible heat engine cycle model in which the working substance is composed of many non-interacting harmonic oscillator systems and in which the inner friction was taken into account. Using the equation of motion of an operator in the Heisenberg picture and semi-group approach they obtained the first law of thermodynamics for a harmonic system and the time evolution of the system. Basing on the quantum master equation and semi group approach they have analyzed the optimal performance characteristic of a harmonic quantum heat engine and described the optimal ranges for several important parameters like as: efficiency, rate of entropy production, the temperatures of the working substance at the special points. They performed the numerical computation in which they presented some important characterics curves of the cycle, which uncovers explicitly connections between any two parameters. At the end, they discussed in brief the some special cases in which the temperature are high enough or the inner friction is not considered.