Inertial frictional ratchets and their load bearing efficiencies

TL;DR

This paper explores how inertial frictional ratchets perform under various conditions, revealing non-monotonic efficiency behavior and load-dependent efficiency increases despite decreasing currents, with detailed parameter analysis.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the efficiency behavior of inertial frictional ratchets under sinusoidal driving and load, highlighting counterintuitive effects and parameter dependencies.

Findings

Efficiency shows non-monotonic dependence on mean friction coefficient.

Efficiency increases with load in high friction regimes despite decreasing current.

Counterintuitive efficiency behavior is explained through detailed analysis.

Abstract

We investigate the performance of an inertial frictional ratchet in a sinusoidal potential driven by a sinusoidal external field. The dependence of the performance on the parameters of the sinusoidally varying friction, such as the mean friction coefficient and its phase difference with the potential, is studied in detail. Interestingly, under certain circumstances, the thermodynamic efficiency of the ratchet against an applied load shows a non-monotonic behavior as a function of the mean friction coefficient. Also, in the large friction ranges, the efficiency is shown to increase with increasing applied load even though the corresponding ratchet current decreases as the applied load increases. These counterintuitive numerical results are explained in the text.