Ericsson Cycle

The Ericsson cycle is a thermodynamic cycle named after its inventor, the Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson, who designed and built several heat engines based on it. It is a modified form of the Carnot cycle that replaces the Carnot cycle two isentropic processes with two isothermal regeneration processes, using a regenerator to recover heat from the gas as it is exhausted and preheat the gas before it is compressed again. In the ideal cycle a working gas is compressed isothermally while giving off heat, then heated further at constant pressure by passing through the regenerator, expands isothermally while doing work, and finally passes back through the regenerator to give up its remaining heat at constant pressure before the cycle repeats. Because the regenerator recovers heat that would otherwise be wasted, the Ericsson cycle can approach the theoretical efficiency of the Carnot cycle while requiring less heat input and yielding more net work than a simpler engine cycle.