Thermodynamic Degradation Science

10The Theory of Organization: Final Thoughts

This chapter is a late entry, where we present final thoughts to help serve as a two page summary for the notions in this book. To do so we present the Theory of Organization for stability, reliability, and quality. Since we are often interested in the solution to the issues of degradation, the best general top-down approach that we can offer is to assert the following.

The Theory of Organization for stability, reliability, and quality: For a system, subsystem, component, material, or process, in general, the higher the organization, the more likely is the probability of success over time.

In fact, statistically, reliability is the probability of success over time (see Equations (A.2) and (A.10)). If P_i = 1/N for N different microstates (i = 1, 2, …, N) then, as we have stated in Equation (2.31), our measure of disorder for entropy is

(10.1)

This helps our notion of entropy, disorder, and, of course, order over time. The larger the number of N_i microstates that can be occupied, the greater is the potential for disorder. We therefore seek to simplify the number of possible states in a system and the capability of the system to fill the microstates. For example, we might model the capability of a system to fill the microstates in time and cause entropy damage as:

(10.2)

In this model, there are two variables to control disorder: ...