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Johnson noise engines and demons
Related work on the energy-requirement of
control (criticizing deficiencies in historical approaches to Maxwell
demon and Szilard engine), Invited talk at the conference "All the Colors of Noise", Lecce,
Italy, November 2011:
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Conference presentation (at ICNF Toronto,
Canada, June 14, 2011):
"Thermal noise driven heat engines",
Click
here for the presentation
Papers/manuscripts:
Possible utilization
of
thermal noise for energy harvesting. Electrical heat engines
driven by the Johnson-Nyquist noise of resistors are introduced. They
utilize Coulomb's law and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of
statistical physics that is the reverse phenomenon of heat dissipation
in a resistor. No steams, gases, liquids, photons, combustion, phase
transition, or exhaust/pollution are present here. In these engines,
instead of heat reservoirs, cylinders, pistons and valves, resistors,
capacitors and switches are the building elements. For the best
performance, a large number of parallel engines must be integrated to
run in a synchronized fashion and the characteristic size of the
elementary engine must be at the 10 nanometers scale. At room
temperature, in the most idealistic case, a two-dimensional ensemble of
engines of 25 nanometer characteristic size integrated on a 2.5x2.5 cm
silicon wafer with 12 Celsius temperature difference between the
warm-source and the cold-sink would produce a specific power of about
0.4 Watt. Regular and coherent (correlated-cylinder states) versions
are shown and both of them can work in either four-stroke or two-stroke
modes. The coherent engines have properties that correspond to coherent
quantum heat engines without the presence of quantum coherence. In the
idealistic case, all these engines have Carnot efficiency, which is the
highest possible efficiency of any heat engine, without violating the
second law of thermodynamics.
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