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Extracting chemical energy by growing disorder: Efficiency at maximum power

par Esposito, Massimiliano ;Lindenberg, Katja;Van den Broeck, Wouter
Référence Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2010, 1, P01008
Publication Publié, 2010

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

We consider the efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the environment by the growth of a copolymer made of two constituent units in the entropy-driven regime. We show that the thermodynamic nonlinearity associated with the information processing aspect is responsible for a branching of the system properties such as power, speed of growth, entropy production, and efficiency, with varying affinity. The standard linear thermodynamics argument which predicts an efficiency of 1/2 at maximum power is inappropriate because the regime of maximum power is located either outside of the linear regime or on a separate bifurcated branch, and because the usual thermodynamic force is not the natural variable for this optimization. © IOP Publishing Ltd.