Comparison of air-standard rectangular cycles with different specific heat models

•Air-standard rectangular cycle models are built and investigated.•Finite-time thermodynamics is applied.•Different dissipation models and variable specific heats models are adopted.•Performance characteristics of different cycle models are compared.

In this paper, performance comparison of air-standard rectangular cycles with constant specific heat (SH), linear variable SH and non-linear variable SH are conducted by using finite time thermodynamics. The power output and efficiency of each cycle model and the characteristic curves of power output versus compression ratio, efficiency versus compression ratio, as well as power output versus efficiency are obtained by taking heat transfer loss (HTL) and friction loss (FL) into account. The influences of HTL, FL and SH on cycle performance are analyzed by detailed numerical examples.