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“The Evolving Design of Our Life” Adrian Bejan’s article in LA+DESIGN magazine

LAD-09-Cover

As an interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture, LA+ DESIGN magazine delves into the role of design in times of transformative technological and environmental change where nothing on Earth, or even in space, seems beyond the reach of designers. 

In the last issue (09, Spring 2019) of LA+DESIGN engineer and physicist Adrian Bejan outlines his constructal law, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems in his article “The Evolving Design of Our Life“.

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Physics, Biology and Economic Inequality

Adrian Bejan’s revolutionary theory proposes that the same laws of nature produce rivers, trees, human beings and wealth distributions.

 

“What nature try to do on its own, we tend to do in our life movement, because we too are part of the flowing nature.”

A piece by Peder Zane on the Wall Street Journal 

Alternatively source WSJ Weekend Interview 2 FEB 2019
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Constructal Design of Aircraft

Fig. 3 The unstable symmetric free–free mode shape of the flying wing
Fig. 14 Distribution of Von Mises stresses along the wing (Pa): a) case 1, b) case 2, c) case 3, d) case 4, e) case 5, f) case 6, g) case 7, and h) case 8.

New fronts of research using Constructal Theory

“Body-freedom flutter characteristics of flying wing aircraft vary with engine placement. Here, we show why a certain design parameter (engine placement) influences the aeroelastic flight envelope of the aircraft. The approach is based on the constructal law and the principle that a design that avoids stress strangulations provides better access to the flows that inhabit the system. This is in sharp contrast with trial-and-error techniques such as optimization, which means to opt from among different choices, cases, and designs. Under the same flight condition, the flow of stresses through the aircraft wings is investigated for several configurations including those with maximum and minimum flutter speeds. The results reveal that when the stresses flow smoothly in the wings the stability of the aircraft improves. On the other hand, in the cases in which the engine location causes stress strangulation, the flutter speed decreases considerably. The most severe stress strangulation corresponds to the aircraft configuration with minimum flutter speed (i.e., engine placement at 20% span behind the reference line). The smoothest flow of stresses happens in the configuration with maximum flutter speed (i.e., engine placement at 80% span forward of the reference line).”

 

Link to the paper at AIAAJ

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The Tortoise and the Hare

41598_2018_30303_Fig9_HTML.png “The fastest animals and vehicles are neither the biggest nor the fastest over lifetime” is the subtitle of A. Bejan, U. Gunes, J. D. Charles, and B. Sahin in their Nature Scientific Report published the 27 August 2018.

Thanks to their theory, in this article, the authors explained phenomena such as the emergence of animal “outliers”:  higher speed at smaller body mass.

They show that what accounts for the animal outlier also accounts for the vehicle outlier: military jet fighter are smaller and reach speeds higher than the biggest commercial aircraft. Yet, like the cheetah, the jet fighter spends most of its active life at rest, on the ground, out of sight.  This new view gives the word ‘outlier’ a different meaning: the jet fighter is the outlier because, during its overall lifetime, it is slower than the bigger commercial aircraft, which spend most of its time flying.

This new meaning is in fact the oldest, taught by Aesop in his fable “The Tortoise and the Hare”: what matters in the life of the mover is the movement – i.e. the territory covered, the speed averaged – over the whole lifetime.