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” ...

“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 ...

THE cycle proposed by Dr. J. S. Haldane (NATURE, August 29, p. 326) as a standard of comparison for steam engine performance can be shown quite readily on a temperature-entropy chart, and thus be ...