is carnot cycle heat pump or heat engine

They are not done infinitely slowly and infinitesimally small steps in temperature are also a theoretical fiction. All real thermodynamic processes are somehow irreversible. If this heat pump is used for the purpose of extracting heat from a low. It is not an actual thermodynamic cycle but is a theoretical construct and cannot be built in practice. Therefore heat engine is also a thermodynamic device operating in a cycle.

Where Q 2 is heat absorbed from the sink, Q 1 is heat rejected to source and T 1 and T 2 are temperatures of source and sink. A system undergoing a Carnot cycle is called a Carnot heat engine. Since WR1 > WR2 the reversible engine R2 can be run as a heat pump by utilizing part of the work delivered by R1. It absorb heat from sink at lower temperature and reject a larger amount of heat to source at higher temperature.Ĭoefficient of performance of refrigerator is given by The efficiency of the Carnot cycle c is obtained from Eq. Īfter doing the calculations for different processes we can show thatĪ refrigerator or heat pump is a device used for cooling things. While the Carnot cycle discussed above produces work, a reversed Carnot cycle (operating counterclockwise) acts as a heat pump, requiring work to transfer heat from a low-temperature energy reservoir to a high-temperature energy reservoir. The net work done per cycle by the engine is numerically equal to the area of the loop representing the Carnot’s cycle. Carnot devised an ideal cycle of operation for a heat engine, called Carnot’s cycle.Ī Carnot’s cycle contains the following four processes

Is carnot cycle heat pump or heat engine