ABSTRACT
The great mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was born more than a century after Sadi Carnot, but nevertheless the closest intellectual parallel to Carnot’s reversible cycle is the so called Turing machine. Turing distilled in an imaginary ’machine’ of extreme purity and simplicity the entire essence of computation. The Otto cycle is named after the four stroke internal combustion engine built by Nikolaus Otto in 1876, and which forms the basis for almost all the automobile engines. The Diesel cycle is considerably different from the Otto cycle, though this too has two adiabatic stages. Of the remaining two, one is an isochoric stage as in the Otto cycle, but the other is an isobaric stage. The Brayton cycle is in fact very close to the Otto cycle except that the two isochoric stages of the Otto cycle are replaced by two isobaric stages.
