Maximum power principle

The maximum power 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 (H.T.Odum 1995, p. 311), "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.

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