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Further observations

Maintaining a particle at constant temperature, as its accessible volume increases, allows it to do work equal to T times the logarithm of the volume increase factor, but only if the particle is confronted by an appropriate potential for it to do work against.

In the following pages we first present some oversimple models that demonstrate the concept of ergodic pumping, but only demonstrate a few kT of work being done by the expansion.

We then present models with additional potential terms and show how several kT of useful work can be extracted during an expansion. One feature of these latter models is that they predict that the external work on a load is done before the ADP-P bond is severed, by coupling that external work to the binding together of two components, which the ADP and P subsequently push apart again.


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