Abstract
Human networks and engineered systems are traditionally designed to maximize efficiency. Ecosystems on the other hand, achieve long-term robustness and sustainability by maintaining a unique balance between pathway efficiency and redundancy, measured in terms of the number of flow pathways available for a given unit of flow at any node in the network. Translating this flow-based ecosystem robustness into an engineering context supports the creation of new robust and sustainable design guidelines for engineered systems. Thermodynamic cycles provide good examples of human systems where simple and clearly defined modifications can be made to increase efficiency. Twenty-three variations on the Brayton and Rankine cycles are used to understand the relationship between design decisions that maximize a system’s efficient use of energy (measured by thermodynamic first law efficiency) and ecological measures of robustness and structural efficiency. The results reveal that thermodynamic efficiency and ecological pathway efficiency do not always correlate and that while on average modifications to increase energy efficiency reduce the robustness of the system, the engineering understanding of ecological network design presented here can enable decisions that are able to increase both energy efficiency and robustness.
Highlights
Sustainable systemsSustainability of a system can be defined as its ability to maintain function in the present and future, despite fluctuations in inputs, demand, and the surroundings [1]
The addition of components such as feed-water heaters (FWHs), reheaters, and intercoolers increases the thermodynamic efficiency of the Rankine and Brayton cycles [31]
The results clearly show that the power cycles are able to increase their ecological robustness and their thermal efficiency at times, these +/+ scenarios upon investigation can be seen to be points where value remaining in the working fluid that originally was dumped to the surroundings is cleverly circulated back into the power cycle using components such as heat exchangers, intercoolers, reheaters and open feedwater pumps
Summary
Sustainability of a system can be defined as its ability to maintain function in the present and future, despite fluctuations in inputs, demand, and the surroundings [1]. Many considerations go into defining sustainability of systems, including their social, economic, and environmental aspects [2,3,4]. Robustness is an important aspect of sustainability in systems as it can enhance the ability of a system to function effectively under different kinds of disturbances [3, 5]. Designing for robustness is a common goal across many disciplines that deal with systems, for example design theory and methodology.
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