One famous limit of thermodynamics is that heat engines, like steam engines and internal combustion engines, must be less efficient than a Carnot heat engine (a heat engine cycle designed by French ...

IN a paper on Carnot's Cycle and the Efficiency of Heat Engines, reported in NATURE, August 29, Dr. J. S. Haldane comes to the astonishing conclusion that “the Carnot cycle is radically in efficient” ...

Thermoelectrics using nanostructures offers the potential of getting very close to the carnot limit of efficiency using very light weight systems for convert heat to electricity. Early versions of ...

Invisibly small carbon nanotubes aligned as fibers and sewn into fabrics become a thermoelectric generator that can turn heat from the sun or other sources into energy.

Power boost: a quantum heat engine in synthetic diamond. (Courtesy: Jonas Becker) Physicists have in recent years built a number of microscopic heat engines to investigate how the laws of ...

ON p. 326 of NATURE for August 29 appears an abstract of a paper by Dr. J. S. Haldane, which he read before the Institution of Mining Engineers on June 16. In this paper he has “thrown to the winds” ...