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Energy flow is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. [1] All living organisms can be organized into producers and consumers , and those producers and consumers can further be organized into a food chain .
Biological thermodynamics (Thermodynamics of biological systems) is a science that explains the nature and general laws of thermodynamic processes occurring in living organisms as nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems that convert the energy of the Sun and food into other types of energy. The nonequilibrium thermodynamic state of living ...
Like the maximum power theorem, Odum's statement of the maximum power principle relies on the notion of 'matching', such that high-quality energy maximizes power by matching and amplifying energy (1994, pp. 262, 541): "in surviving designs a matching of high-quality energy with larger amounts of low-quality energy is likely to occur" (1994, p ...
Bioenergetics is a field in biochemistry and cell biology that concerns energy flow through living systems. [1] This is an active area of biological research that includes the study of the transformation of energy in living organisms and the study of thousands of different cellular processes such as cellular respiration and the many other metabolic and enzymatic processes that lead to ...
The flow of energy in an ecosystem is an open system; the Sun constantly gives the planet energy in the form of light while it is eventually used and lost in the form of heat throughout the trophic levels of a food web. Carbon is used to make carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, the major sources of food energy. These compounds are oxidized to ...
Due to non-predatory death, egestion, and cellular respiration, a significant amount of energy is lost to the environment instead of being absorbed for production by consumers. The figure approximates the fraction of energy available after each stage of energy loss in a typical ecosystem, although these fractions vary greatly from ecosystem to ...
In thermodynamics, the Gibbs free energy (or Gibbs energy as the recommended name; symbol ) is a thermodynamic potential that can be used to calculate the maximum amount of work, other than pressure–volume work, that may be performed by a thermodynamically closed system at constant temperature and pressure.
The rate of heat flow is the amount of heat that is transferred per unit of time in some material, usually measured in watts (joules per second). Heat is the flow of thermal energy driven by thermal non-equilibrium, so the term 'heat flow' is a redundancy (i.e. a pleonasm). Heat must not be confused with stored thermal energy, and moving a hot ...