International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 126 (2018) 1377–1378

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

In Celebration

Celebration of Professor Adrian Bejan on his 70th birthday

1. In honor of Professor Adrian Bejan on his 70th anniversary

We celebrate the extraordinarily creative career of Professor
Adrian Bejan in the thermal sciences. His life and scientific record
were reviewed in detail ten years ago, on the occasion of his 60thanniversary [1]. His work across decades is consistently scholarly.
One wonders if the primary reason for this is his conscious
avoidance of administrative positions, be it in academia or in
the research enterprise.
Today, we marvel at what he has accomplished since 2008, andhow revolutionary and long-lasting his career contributions
continue to be. There is so much to choose from in what he has
accomplished during the past ten years that here we present only
three of the highlights:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2018.06.150

Professor Bejan took his science and made it accessible to thegeneral public. He published two highly successful books for general audiences, Design in Nature [2] and The Physics of Life [3].
These books start from thermodynamics and convection, and build
the physics foundation for everything around and inside us: flow,power, life, death, technology, wealth, social organization and evolution. They have been translated in Japanese, Chinese, Korean,Russian and Romanian. Professor Bejan is a public figure, an advocate for the pivotal role of engineering science in the advanced civilized world. Adrian Bejan speaks loudly through his remarkably
creative deeds. He first built a magnificent record of scientific contributions, and now, on that record, his physics arguments and predictions rest firmly.
Adrian Bejan’s impact on the thermal sciences is made permanent by his original methods of theory, modeling, analysis anddesign, which today are associated with his name: entropy generation minimization, constructal law, evolutionary design, life andevolution as physics, scale analysis, intersection of asymptotes,
heatlines and masslines, the temperature–heat diagram (the T–Qdiagram), and many more. He teaches the history of science, graphics, the oneness of science and art, and defends the integrity ofscience [4,5]. He sounds the alarm against publishing practices thatgive the impression of false science, citations cartels, nationalism,groupthink, unoriginal work, and lack of credit given to the original
sources.
Professor Bejan continues to be widely acclaimed for hislegendary position in science. A fitting summary was just published on the occasion of his Benjamin Franklin Medal [6], fromwhich we reproduce these passages:<<Citation: For his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions inthermodynamics and convection heat transfer that have improved
the performance of engineering systems, and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering,scientific, and social systems.
It is rather unusual for a mechanical engineer to be creditedwith conceiving a new theory in physics. Engineers, after all, generally specialize in coming up with new applications of physicallaws, leaving the fundamental principles to the physicists. But
Adrian Bejan is more than a typical engineer. He became a full professor at Duke University in 1984, already making major contributions to the field of thermal sciences.
He published several books, which have become seminal works
in thermodynamics. In 1982, his very first book introduced theconcept of entropy generation minimization, which combines heattransfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics principles into simple models to facilitate engineering design. His colleagues evencoined the ‘‘Bejan number” (Be) after him, a mathematical term

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In Celebration / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 126 (2018) 1377–1378

for a certain ratio used in thermodynamics in combination withfluid mechanics.
It was in 1996, however, that he published what became hismost notable and daringly original work to date. At a conferencea year earlier in France, he heard Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine discuss branching patterns found in nature, such as in trees or in thevascular systems of animals. He found himself disagreeing with
Prigogine’s assertion that such phenomena were merely coincidental. Bejan was certain that there had to be an underlying principle
at work that governed it all. He found that principle in what he termed ‘‘constructal theory.”
Constructal theory states that a finite system can persist only if
it evolves in accordance with the currents that flow through it. As
he explains, ‘‘The designs we see in nature are not the result ofchance. They arise naturally, spontaneously because they enhanceaccess to flow in time.‘‘ A river delta, for example, begins with asingle stream, then develops tributaries and branches, increasingin complexity as water continues to flow and seek easier paths.
Constructal theory is grounded in the laws of thermodynamics,
but has shown applicability far beyond, through a wide, and often
surprising, range of fields. Bejan has used constructal theory toshow how patterns of social interaction and economics evolve inan analogous fashion, holding implications for the social sciencesand demonstrating the fundamental physics underlying even thesedisciplines.
It sounds simple, but in that simplicity is its power, as has been
demonstrated in the work of Bejan and others. Emphasizing theongoing evolution of design in nature over both short and longtime scales, constructal theory points the way to engineering
approaches consistent with those observed in the natural world
and allows for more efficient and sustainable approaches to thedesign of electronics, heating systems, vehicles, traffic management, and urban infrastructure, among many other areas.
Adrian Bejan’s career serves as a unique example of how anengineer can make lasting and seminal contributions that transcend the conventional barriers that separate disparate fields andinstead unify them in ways that benefit and complement themall.>>
References[1] J.L. Lage et al, In celebration Professor Adrian Bejan on his 60th birthday, Int. J.
Heat Mass Transfer 51 (25–26) (2008) 5759–5761.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0017931008004201.
[2] A. Bejan, J.P. Zane, Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs
Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization, Doubleday,New York, 2012.
[3] A. Bejan, The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything, St. Martin’s Press, NewYork, 2016.
[4] A. Bejan, Evolution in thermodynamics, Appl. Phys. Rev. 4 (2017) 011305.
[5] A. Bejan, Comment on ‘‘Study on the consistency between field synergy
principle and entransy dissipation extremum principle”, Int. J. Heat Mass
Transfer 120 (2018) 1187–1188.
[6] https://www.fi.edu/laureates/adrian-bejan.

⇑

José L. Lage ,1W.J. Minkowycz
Cristina H. Amon
Mohamed M. Awad
Tanmay BasakYildiz Bayazitoglu
Cesare Biserni
Jocelyn Bonjour
Romano Borchiellini
Erdal ÇetkinYanyu Chen
W.K. Chow
Jack Chun
Vitor Costa
Weizhong Dai_Ibrahim
DinçerAmir Faghri
Dominique Gobin
Louis Gosselin
Giuseppe Grazzini
Heinz Herwig
G.F. ’Jerry’ Jones
F.A. Kulacki
Calvin Li
Xianguo Li
Yuguo Li
Noam Lior
Sylvie Lorente
Giulio Lorenzini
Umberto Lucia
Oronzio Manca
Josua P. Meyer
Antonio MiguelLuiz Fernando Milanez
Yuri S. Muzychka
Arunn Narasimhan
Greg F. Naterer
Donald A. Nield
G.P. Bud Peterson
Heitor Reis
John W. Rose
Dusan P. Sekulic
Deng Shi-ming
E.M. Sparrow
Wojciech Stanek
George Tsatsaronis
C.Y. Wen
William M. Worek
Houlei Zhang
Yuwen Zhang⇑ Corresponding author at: Mechanical Engineering Department,
Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750337, Dallas,
TX 75275-0337, USA.
E-mail address: jll@smu.edu, jlage@nsf.gov (J.L. Lage)
Available online 13 July 2018

1
Currently on leave at: Director, Thermal Transport Processes Program, Division ofChemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET), Directoratefor Engineering, National Science Foundation, 2415 Eisenhower Ave., Suite E13467,Alexandria, VA 22314, USA.