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 ...

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 ...