A VARIATIONAL APPROACH TO SOME PROPERTIES OF ENDOREVERSIBLE HEAT ENGINES

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.