Problem 1: A young engineer notices in her plant that 1-kg blocks of brick are routinely removed from a 800 °C oven and are let stand to cool in air at 25 °C. Conscious about cost-cutting and efficiency, she wonders whether some work could be recovered from this process. Calculate the maximum amount of work that could be obtained. The CP of brick is 0.9 kJ/kg K. Can you come up with devices that could extract this work?

Problem 2: A Carnot cycle operating between 600 °C and 25 °C absorbs 1000 kJ of heat from the high-temperature reservoir. The work produced is used to power another Carnot cycle which transfers 1000 kJ of heat from 600 °C to a reservoir at higher temperature TH .

a) Calculate the amount of work exchanged between the two cycles.

b) Calculate the temperature TH .

c) Calculate the amount of heat that is transferred to the reservoir at TH .