We study the energestics of a thermal motor driven by temperature differences, which consists of Brownian particles moving in a sawtooth potential with an external load where the viscous medium is alternately in contact with hot and cold heat reservoir along space coordinate. The motor can work as a heat engine or a refrigerator under different conditions. The heat flow via both potential and kinetic energy are considered. The former is reversible when the engine works quasistatically and the latter is always irreversible. The efficiency of the heat engine (Coefficient Of Performance (COP) of a refrigerator) can never approach Carnot efficiency (COP).
Heat conduction through the Frenkel-Kontorova chain under the influence of an ac driving force applied locally at one boundary is studied by nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. We observe the occurrence of thermal resonance, namely, there exists a value of the driving frequency at which the heat flux takes its maximum value. The resonance frequency is determined by the dynamical parameters of the model, which has been numerically explored. Remarkably, the heat can be pumped from the low-temperature heat bath to the high temperature one by suitably adjusting the frequency of the ac driving force. By examining effects of the driving amplitude on heat conduction, we show that the amplitude threshold for nonlinear supratransmission is absent when the system is in contact with heat baths, namely, the heat flux smoothly increases with the increasing of amplitude.
We study the interaction of both dense and sparse multi-armed spirals in bistable media modeled by equations of FitzHugh-Nagumo type. Dense 1-armed spiral is characterized by its fixed tip. For dense multi-armed spirals, when the initial distance between tips is less than a critical value, the arms collide, connect and disconnect continuously as the spirals rotate. The continuous reconstruction between the front and the back drives the tips to corotate along a rough circle and to meander zigzaggedly. The rotation frequency of tip, the frequency of zigzagged displacement, the frequency of spiral, the oscillation frequency of media, and the number of arms satisfy certain relations as long as the control parameters of the model are fixed. When the initial distance between tips is larger than the critical value, the behaviors of individual arms within either dense or sparse multi-armed spirals are identical to that of corresponding 1-armed spirals.
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