Exergy use in bioenergetics Online publication date: Wed, 07-Jul-2004
by Y. Demirel
International Journal of Exergy (IJEX), Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004
Abstract: Every developed and adapted biological system extracts useful energy from outside, converts, stores it, and uses for muscular contraction, substrate transport, protein synthesis, and other energy utilising processes. This energy management in a living cell is called the bioenergetics, and the useful energy is the exergy, which is destroyed in every irreversible process because of the entropy production. The converted exergy is the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) produced through the oxidative phosphorylation coupled to respiration in which the exergy originates from oxidation of reducing equivalents of nutrients. A living cell uses the ATP for all the energy demanding activities; it has to maintain non-vanishing thermodynamic forces, such as electrochemical potential gradient, and hence is an open, nonequilibrium system, which manages the exergy destruction and power production to adapt the fluctuations in energy demand and production within mitochondria. A simplified example presented here shows that the use of exergy analysis is helpful for understanding and analysing oxidative phosphorylation in bioenergetics.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Exergy (IJEX):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook