Power plants for thermal power stations
Power generation by thermal power plants

In practical terms, a Carnot cycle (figure 6) is very difficult to implement, since it would involve carrying out heat exchanges Q₁₂ and Q₃₄ at rigorously constant temperature while decreasing pressure on the one hand and increasing it on the other. Industrially, heat transfers take place at constant (or substantially constant) pressure in heat exchangers or in furnaces where combustion takes place. On the other hand, the two isentropes are easier to design, since they correspond to reversible adiabatic evolutions (expansion 2-3 and compression 4-1) (to avoid entropy creation). However, they cannot be strictly realized, since irreversibility is unavoidable in practice.