A

David

Darling

dissipative structure

The term "dissipative structure" is used by the Prigogine School (from Ilya Prigogine, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) to describe emergent structures arising in self-organizing systems. Such structures are dissipative by serving to dissipate energy in the system. They happen at a critical threshold of far-from-equilibrium conditions. An example is the hexagonal convection cells that emerge in the Benard System when it is heated. Another example are the so-called chemical clocks demonstrated in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. These chemical clocks are composed of both temporal structures, such as a shift from one color to another with the regularity of a clock, and spatial structures such as spiral waves.