Constructal Theory

Description

Roberto Verzola:

"It is used by Adrian Bejan to describe his theory of the emergence of patterns and structures in a wide range of phenomena--physical, biological, social, etc. Bejan says (more or less) that in all kinds of phenomena that involve flows (of electrons, molecules, air, water, blood, goods, people, information, knowledge, energy, heat, etc.), the flow naturally searches for--and finds--paths of least resistance. He calls this the "constructal law". Another way of saying this is that the flow discovers the paths that require the least energy. And this process generates patterns and structures that turn out to be surprisingly common among an extremely wide range of phenomena. The patterns and structures invariably take not a linear form, but very often take the form of a tree or an inverted tree in open systems, or in closed system the form of a mesh (though not the ordinary net, but more like the human circulatory system, with varying sizes of pathways)." (p2p-f mailing list, June 2016)