Discover the fascinating physics behind the formation of loops in nature’s intricate transport networks, from electrical discharges to biological systems.
The Stability of Loops
Researchers have been intrigued for years by the many shapes and forms of these natural transportation networks that help circulate blood through our bodies or, less admirably, transport common electrical discharges during storms. Interesting is that these networks are characterized by loops, which are important for the stability and also resilience of them.
In the lives of living creatures, play a variety of looping structures and ventilators that carry oxygen, nutrients, where from there take metabolic waste products. One way in which these looping networks were less vulnerable to damage is crucial. In a network without loops, the destruction of one branch suffices to disconnect all associated branches; in a network with loops, there is always another way to connect to the rest of the system that guarantees its continuous operation.
The Formation of Loops
The process behind the emergence of loops in transport networks has been an open question for many years. But past research showed what a strange phenomenon this appeared to be.
What the researchers noticed, was when one of the branches reached the boundary of the system, its interactions with other branches radically change. Branches which previously repel each other instead begin to attract, causing loops to rapidly form. This phenomenon has been identified in a surprisingly broad array of systems, including electrical discharge networks and fluid mechanics instabilities, to biological transport networks such as the canal system of the jellyfish Aurelia aurita.
Led by Ph. D. Stanisław Żukowski and his team of researchers To answer this question, researchers led by Marta Mieczkowska D. from the University of Warsaw and the Université Paris Cité have created a model that describes how these loops are formed. They discovered that attraction between branches which are on the right side of neighboring branches in the resulting configurations occurs by themselves along loops and push each other away allowing to observe the competition and repulsion when one branch hits a boundary forming natural circular patterns.
Conclusion
The finding could be very important to better understand how complex systems like nature’s transport networks may form loops. These discoveries could apply to systems as diverse as electronics and biology, helping to explain how these complicated networks remain stable and fail-safe. Now that we have a deeper understanding of how loops form, the researchers say these lessons can be used to design better ways to build transport systems – both technological and biological.
