Ga. Deparga et M. Santillan, A VARIATIONAL APPROACH TO SOME PROPERTIES OF ENDOREVERSIBLE HEAT ENGINES, Revista Mexicana de Fisica, 44(4), 1998, pp. 373-376
Endoreversible heat engine models are irreversible thermal cycles wher
e the whole entropy production is only ascribed to the couplings betwe
en the working fluid and its heat reservoirs. This kind of thermodinam
ic systems have been extensively studied under diverse criteria of mer
it. In this work we recover the so-called semisum property for an endo
reversible engine working in a regime that represents a good compromis
e between high power output and low entropy production (the ecological
regime) by means of a variational approach. We apply variational calc
ulus over functionals corresponding to thermodynamic processes.