Heat Engines: An Overview

In Heat Engines: An Overview, the effect of temperature on the performance characteristics of air standard cycles is reconsidered. Four different thermodynamic cycles are analyzed: Otto, Brayton, Stirling and Ericsson cycles. Specifically, the effects of temperature on the power and efficiency of the aforementioned cycles are addressed quantitatively by means of several modeling assumptions. The authors investigate two organic rankine cycle arrangements modelled for two types of heat sources in MATLAB software and genetic algorithms, which were used for parametric optimization to maximize the thermal efficiency for eight different working fluids. The closing study presents a new conception for heat engines. Unlike conventional heat engines, the working medium has an additional degree of freedom, the rotation around a given axis. The heat introduced and removed may lead to a change in the parameters of temperature, pressure, and volume, which are considered in conventional thermodynamics.