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

The smaller the better, and in a world of fast-developing technology, that’s called innovation. Just this month, a desk-sized turbine capable of powering a small town was announced to be under ...

February 13, 2009 Technology capable of generating electricity by extracting energy from heat that is otherwise just wasted is a fairly new branch of renewable technology. A typical co-generation ...

Just how small can you make an engine? Two researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Valentin Blickle and Clemens Bechinger, successfully ...

In the early years of the nineteenth century, steam engines were at work in a variety of practical uses. However, they were still imperfect in many ways. One particular problem were the boilers, that ...

“We’ve developed the world’s smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine, and found that the machine really does perform work,” said Clemens Bechinger, a physicist at the ...

Quantum thermodynamics explores the fundamental principles governing energy conversion at the smallest scales, where quantum effects such as coherence and entanglement significantly influence the ...

The heat engine works as its intrinsic spin converts heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations of a trapped ion. Credit: John Goold, Trinity College Dublin A new heat engine made from a ...

The model Stirling engine is a staple of novelty catalogues, and we daresay that were it not for their high price there might be more than one Hackaday reader or writer who might own one. All is not ...