Enhancing Otto refrigerator performance with a precooling strategy.

Abstract

The precooling strategy, which leads to exponentially faster heating, is a counterintuitive relaxation phenomenon wherein cooling the system before heating it dramatically shortens the relaxation time. We investigate the performance of a Markovian system functioning as an Otto refrigerator for a finite time, incorporating a precooling stage before the cyclic heating process. Our results demonstrate that precooling prior to the heating process in the Otto cycle optimizes the machine's performance by significantly enhancing the machine performance and the stability of the refrigerator.