Maximum power principle

The maximum power principle or Lotka's principle has been proposed as the fourth principle of energetics in open system thermodynamics, where an example of an open system is a biological cell. According to Howard T. Odum, 'The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.'It has been pointed out by Boltzmann that the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle, in the evolution of the organic world, is available energy. In accord with this observation is the principle that, in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species....it seems to this author appropriate to unite the biological and physical traditions by giving the Darwinian principle of natural selection the citation as the fourth law of thermodynamics, since it is the controlling principle in rate of heat generation and efficiency settings in irreversible biological processes....it may be time to recognize the maximum power principle as the fourth thermodynamic law as suggested by Lotka.Maximum power might be misunderstood to mean giving priority to low level processes. ... However, the higher level transformation processes are just as important as the low level processes. ... Therefore, Lotka's principle is clarified by stating it as the principle of self organization for maximum empower. The maximum power principle or Lotka's principle has been proposed as the fourth principle of energetics in open system thermodynamics, where an example of an open system is a biological cell. According to Howard T. Odum, 'The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.' Chen (2006) has located the origin of the statement of maximum power as a formal principle in a tentative proposal by Alfred J. Lotka (1922a, b). Lotka's statement sought to explain the Darwinian notion of evolution with reference to a physical principle. Lotka's work was subsequently developed by the systems ecologist Howard T. Odum in collaboration with the Chemical Engineer Richard C. Pinkerton, and later advanced by the Engineer Myron Tribus. While Lotka's work may have been a first attempt to formalise evolutionary thought in mathematical terms, it followed similar observations made by Leibniz and Volterra and Ludwig Boltzmann, for example, throughout the sometimes controversial history of natural philosophy. In contemporary literature it is most commonly associated with the work of Howard T. Odum. The significance of Odum's approach was given greater support during the 1970s, amid times of oil crisis, where, as Gilliland (1978, pp. 100) observed, there was an emerging need for a new method of analysing the importance and value of energy resources to economic and environmental production. A field known as energy analysis, itself associated with net energy and EROEI, arose to fulfill this analytic need. However, in energy analysis intractable theoretical and practical difficulties arose when using the energy unit to understand, a) the conversion among concentrated fuel types (or energy types), b) the contribution of labour, and c) the contribution of the environment.