Brownian ratchet a heat bath in that they undergo random Brownian motion with a mean kinetic energy that is determined by the temperature. The device is imagined as being small enough that the impulse from a single molecular collision can turn the paddle. Although such collisions would tend to turn the rod in either direction with equal probability, the pawl allows the ratchet to rotate in one direction only. The net effect of many such random collisions would seem to be that the ratchet rotates continuously in that direction. The ratchet's motion then can be used to do work on other systems,
Reflected Brownian motion Reflected Brownian motion In probability theory, reflected Brownian motion (or regulated Brownian motion, both with the acronym RBM) is a Wiener process in a space with reflecting boundaries. RBMs have been shown to describe queueing models experiencing heavy traffic as first proposed by Kingman and proven by Iglehart and Whitt. A "d"–dimensional reflected Brownian motion "Z" is a stochastic process on formula_1 uniquely defined by where "X"("t") is an unconstrained Brownian motion and with "Y"("t") a "d"–dimensional vector where The reflection matrix describes boundary behaviour. In the interior of formula_4 the process behaves like a Wiener process, on the boundary