Power Plants and Cycles: Advances and Trends

The aforementioned technique consists in converting heat into useful mechanical work both by adding
heat from a source to a thermal working fluid, and by extracting heat from the thermal working fluid to
a heat sink, where the added heat is converted into mechanical work by expansion of the thermal
working fluid, while the extracted heat is converted into mechanical work by contraction of the thermal
working fluid, and where both transformations can be carried out in an engine structure composed by
a reciprocating double-acting actuator or in a turbine operating through baro-thermal pulses.