Performance of a heat engine from interacting Brownian particles under nonautonomous periodic force

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a heat engine from interacting underdamped Brownian particles within a nonautonomous periodic force. In the formalism of finite-time stochastic thermodynamics, we formulate the expression of thermodynamic quantities such as heat flux, entropy, work and power of a model in the perfectly tight coupling limit. We study the efficiency in the condition of the maximum power output, depending on the external forces from which the network is extracted. We determine the optimum performance of the model with the unifying energy converter criteria. We further establish that the engine's performance characteristics can be described using scaled quantities such as efficiency-wise, power-wise and period-wise as a function of Carnot efficiency. Finally, we show that stronger coupling generally results in better performance, but careful protocol design leads to a greater efficient small-scale engine.