Modelling energy and substance exchanges between interacting environmental interfaces regarded as complex systems

Abstract

The field of environmental sciences is abundant with various interfaces and it is the right place for application of new fundamental approaches leading towards better understanding of environmental phenomena. Generalizing the notion of physical and biophysical interactions between different media (e.g. between natural or artificially built surfaces and atmosphere or between intercellular space and cell's surrounding environment), we obtain the potentially fruitful concept of environmental interface as a higher-dimensional complex system. In this paper, we report the results of numerical investigation on the coupled system of two logistic maps, representing (i) energy exchange on environmental interfaces, with different logistic parameters such that one map lies in a period one stable attractor or a bifurcation point and the other in chaotic region when decoupled and (ii) substance exchange between two cells in their surrounding environment having the form of coupled logistic equation and power map expressing the nonlinearity of the processes. ©2009 IEEE.