The following is our response to Herwig's paper [1] entitled, “Do we really need “entransy”? A critical assessment of a new quantity in heat transfer”. In Herwig's paper, he questioned the consistency of G (entransy) in Sec. 4.1 and the necessity of G in Sec. 4.2. Before responding to these two questions, we would like to state once again that the entransy approach is consistent with first and second law of thermodynamics, and is needed for optimizing heat transfer process not involving in a thermodynamic cycle.
The gap in the existing heat transfer analyses is that no measure of irreversibility is directly related to the optimization of heat transfer not involving in a thermodynamic cycle. The entransy approach fills this need. Detailed differences between entransy analyses and entropy analyses include the purposes of heat transfer process, irreversibility, and optimization objectives can be found in our recently published review...
