A solar cell is a heat engine, but textbook treatments are not wholly satisfactory from a thermodynamic standpoint, since they present solar cells as directly converting the energy of light into electricity, and the current ...

We introduce the “leaking elastic capacitor” (LEC) model, a nonconservative dynamical system that combines simple electrical and mechanical degrees of freedom. We show that an LEC connected to an external voltage source ...

We propose a dynamical theory of how the chemical energy stored in a battery generates the electromotive force (emf). In this picture, the battery's half-cell acts as an engine, cyclically extracting work from its underlying ...

Engines are open systems that can generate work cyclically at the expense of an external disequilibrium. They are ubiquitous in nature and technology, but the course of mathematical physics over the last 300 years has ...