Talks

Refrigerators are inseparable from everyday life, industrial manufacturing, and research labs. In this talk, I will present our recent investigation on the refrigerator working between a finite-sized cold heat sink (which means that the heat capacity of the cold bath is finite) and an infinite-sized hot reservoir (environment). We assume that initially the finite-sized cold heat sink at temperature Ti ≤ Th, where Th is the hot reservoir temperature. By consuming the input work/power, the refrigerator transfers the heat from a finite-sized cold sink to the hot heat reservoir. Hence, the temperature of the finite-sized cold heat sink starts to decrease until it reaches the desired low-temperature Tf. By minimizing the input work in this heat transport process, we find the optimal path for temperature rate. We also calculate the coefficient of performance of the refrigerator.