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Linear Irreversible Thermodynamics: A Glance at Thermoelectricity and the Biological Scaling Laws
Juan Carlos Chimal-Eguia1, Ricardo Teodoro Páez-Hernández2, Juan Carlos Pacheco-Paez3
1Laboratorio de Ciencias Matemáticas y Computacionales, Centro de Investigación en Computacion, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Ciudad de Mexico 07738, Mexico.
Abstract:
This paper presents so-called thermoelectric generators (TEGs), which are considered thermal engines that transform heat into electricity using the Seebeck effect for this purpose. By using linear irreversible thermodynamics (LIT), it is possible to study the thermodynamic properties of TEGs for three different operating regimes: maximum power output (MPO), maximum ecological function (MEF) and maximum power efficiency (MPE). Then, by considering thermoelectricty, using the correspondence between the heat capacity of a solid and the metabolic rate, and taking the generation of energy by means of the metabolism of an organism as a process out of equilibrium, it is plausible to use linear irreversible thermodynamics (LIT) to obtain some interesting results in order to understand how metabolism is generated by a particle's released energy, which explains the empirically studied allometric laws.
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