Violations of the second law of thermodynamics would be regarded as commonplace if it were not for misleading education:
http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Heatengines.html
"A necessary component of a heat engine, then, is that two temperatures are involved. At one stage the system is heated, at another it is cooled."
So the scientific community learns that a heat engine ALWAYS has two heat reservoirs, hot and cold:
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfadd/1360/2...s/Fig22.01.jpg
Isothermal (only one heat reservoir) heat engines are either ignored or presented as impossible by thermodynamics educators and as a result the scientific community believes that they do not exist:
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfadd/1360/2...s/Fig22.03.jpg
Actually heat engines functioning in isothermal conditions (only one heat reservoir) - e.g. the work-producing force is activated by some chemical agent, not by heating - are commonplace. They all violate the second law of thermodynamics. I have already given enough examples.
Pentcho Valev