Author(s)

Haiduke Sarafian

University College, The Pennsylvania State University, York, PA, USA.

It is customary to evaluate the efficiency of four-stroke-cycle heat engines such as Carnot, Otto and Diesel with a working ideal gas [1] [2] [3]. Here we consider various three-stroke-cycle heat engines that are composed of three out of four special processes: adiabatic, isothermal, isobaric and isochoric. We deviate from the customary norm considering the working material to be a polyatomic ideal gas with various degrees of freedom. We develop analytic expressions for the efficiency of each design as a function of degrees of freedom. For suitable practical values of relevant (V, P, T), we evaluate the corresponding efficiencies.

Efficiency of Heat Engine, Three-Stroke-Cycle, Adiabatic, Isothermal Pro-cesses

Sarafian, H. (2018) Impact of Degrees of Freedom of Polyatomic Ideal Gas on Efficiency of Three-Stroke-Cycle Heat Engines. Journal of Modern Physics, 9, 1807-1813. doi: 10.4236/jmp.2018.99114.