Energy conversion in isothermal nonlinear irreversible processes - struggling for higher efficiency

First we discuss some early work of Ulrike Feudel on structure formation in nonlinear reactions including ions and the efficiency of the conversion of chemical into electrical energy. Then we give some survey about energy conversion from chemical to higher forms of energy like mechanical, electrical and ecological energy. We consider examples of energy conversion in several natural processes and in some devices like fuel cells. Further, as an example, we study analytically the dynamics and efficiency of a simple "active circuit" converting chemical into electrical energy and driving currents which is roughly modeling fuel cells. Finally we investigate an analogous ecological system of Lotka - Volterra type consisting of an "active species" consuming some passive "chemical food". We show analytically for both these models that the efficiency increases with the load, reaches values higher then 50 percent in a narrow regime of optimal load and goes beyond some maximal load abrupt to zero.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figure

Thermodynamics of hot dense H-plasmas: Path integral Monte Carlo simulations and analytical approximations

This work is devoted to the thermodynamics of high-temperature dense hydrogen plasmas in the pressure region between $10^{-1}$ and $10^2$ Mbar. In particular we present for this region results of extensive calculations based on a recently developed path integral Monte Carlo scheme (direct PIMC). This method allows for a correct treatment of the thermodynamic properties of hot dense Coulomb systems. Calculations were performed in a broad region of the nonideality parameter $\Gamma \lesssim 3$ and degeneracy parameter $n_e \Lambda^3 \lesssim 10$. We give a comparison with a few available results from other path integral calculations (restricted PIMC) and with analytical calculations based on Pade approximations for strongly ionized plasmas. Good agreement between the results obtained from the three independent methods is found.Comment: RevTex file, 21 pages, 5 ps-figures include

Entropy and Long range correlations in literary English

Recently long range correlations were detected in nucleotide sequences and in human writings by several authors. We undertake here a systematic investigation of two books, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales, with respect to the existence of long range correlations. The analysis is based on the calculation of entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and the entropy, the mean uncertainty, per letter. We further estimate the number of different subwords of a given length $n$. Filtering out the contributions due to the effects of the finite length of the texts, we find correlations ranging to a few hundred letters. Scaling laws for the mutual information (decay with a power law), for the entropy per letter (decay with the inverse square root of $n$) and for the word numbers (stretched exponential growth with $n$ and with a power law of the text length) were found.Comment: 8 page

X-ray/optical classification of cluster mergers and the evolution of the cluster merger fraction

We present the results of a simple but robust morphological classification of a statis- tically complete sample of 108 of the most X-ray luminous clusters at 0.15 < z < 0.7 observed with Chandra. Our aims are to (a) identify the most disturbed massive clusters to be used as gravitational lenses for studies of the distant universe and as probes of particle acceleration mechanisms resulting in non-thermal radio emission, (b) find cluster mergers featuring subcluster trajectories that make them suitable for quantitative analyses of cluster collisions, and (c) constrain the evolution with redshift of the cluster merger fraction. Finally, (d) this paper represents the third public release of clusters from the MACS sample, adding 24 clusters to the 46 published previously. To classify clusters by degree of relaxation, we use the projected offset of the brightest cluster galaxy from the peak (or the global centroid) of the X-ray emission as a measure of the segregation between the intracluster gas and dark matter. Regarding (a), we identify ten complex systems likely to have undergone multiple merger events in the recent past. Regarding (b), we identify eleven systems likely to be post-collision, binary, head-on mergers (BHOMs), as well as another six mergers that are possible BHOMs but probably harder to interpret because of non-negligible impact parameters and merger axes closer to our line of sight. Regarding (c), we find a highly significant increase with redshift in the fraction of morphologically disturbed clusters starting at z \sim 0.4, in spite of a detection bias in our sample against very disturbed systems at high redshift. A larger sample of clusters with high-quality X-ray data in particular at high redshift will be needed to trace the evolutionary history of cluster growth and relaxation closer to the primary epoch of cluster formation z \sim 1.Comment: Accepted to MNRA