Comment on Ben-Amotz and Honig, "Average entropy dissipation in irreversible mesoscopic processes," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 020602 (2006)

TL;DR

This paper critiques a previous work on entropy dissipation, clarifying that most classical thermodynamics results cited are not new and are limited to quasistatic processes, affecting their application to non-quasistatic scenarios.

Contribution

It clarifies the limitations of classical thermodynamics results in the context of irreversible processes, emphasizing their applicability only to quasistatic cases.

Findings

Most classical thermodynamics results are not new.

These results are valid only for quasistatic irreversible processes.

Application to the Jarzynski process is limited.

Abstract

We point out that most of the classical thermodynamics results in the paper have been known in the literature, see Kestin and Woods, for quite some time and are not new, contrary to what the authors imply. As shown by Kestin, these results are valid for quasistatic irreversible processes only and not for arbitrary irreversible processes as suggested in the paper. Thus, the application to the Jarzynski process is limited.