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[...] By the beginning of the 20th century, the principles of thermodynamics were summarized into the so-called four laws, which were, as it turns out, definitive negative answers to the doomed quests for perpetual motion machines. As a matter of fact, one result of Sadi Carnots work was precisely that the heat-to-work conversion process is fundamentally limited; as such, it is considered as a first version of the second law of thermodynamics. Although it was derived from Carnots unrealistic model, the upper bound on the thermodynamic conversion efficiency, known as the Carnot efficiency, became a paradigm as the next target after the failure of the perpetual motion ideal. In the 1950s, Jacques Yvon published a conference paper containing the necessary ingredients for a new class of models, and even a formula, not so different from that of Carnots efficiency, which later would become the new efficiency reference. Yvons first analysis [...] went fairly unnoticed for twenty years, until Frank Curzon and Boye Ahlborn published their pedagogical paper about the effect of finite heat transfer on output power limitation and their derivation of the efficiency at maximum power, now known as the Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency. The notion of finite rate explicitly introduced time in thermodynamics, and its significance cannot be overlooked as shown by the wealth of works devoted to what is now known as finite-time thermodynamics since the end of the 1970s. [...] The object of the article is thus to cover some of the milestones of thermodynamics, and show through the illustrative case of thermoelectric generators, our model heat engine, that the shift from Carnots efficiency to efficiencies at maximum power explains itself naturally as one considers continuity and boundary conditions carefully [...].
Molecular motors transduce chemical energy obtained from hydrolizing ATP into mechanical work exerted against an external force. We calculate their efficiency at maximum power output for two simple generic models and show that the qualitative behavio
The efficiency at maximum power has been investigated extensively, yet the practical control scheme to achieve it remains elusive. We fill such gap with a stepwise Carnot-like cycle, which consists the discrete isothermal process (DIP) and adiabatic
We investigate the efficiency of systems of molecular motors operating at maximum power. We consider two models of kinesin motors on a microtubule: for both the simplified and the detailed model, we find that the many-body exclusion effect enhances t
Several recent theories address the efficiency of a macroscopic thermodynamic motor at maximum power and question the so-called Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency. Considering the entropy exchanges and productions in an n-sources motor, we study the maxi
We consider the nonlinear scattering theory for three-terminal thermoelectric devices, used for power generation or refrigeration. Such systems are quantum phase-cohere