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Mankind has become intensively engaged in studying the biotic mechanisms of the planet because of the increase in the number of new technologies that have pronounced but not always successfully predicted social, medicobiological, and ecological consequences. It has become necessary to associate any action that affects the environment with a forecast of its possible results. This assumes that in each specific problem area there exist ideas concerning the investigated processes, estimates of the significance of different solutions, and assumptions concerning alternatives and different development possibilities. Human experience, stimulated by a marked deterioration in the living environment, has already raised the question of determining the limits of homeostasis, i.e., of the critical environmental parameter values beyond which the existence of civilization, as presently understood, turns out to be impossible. However, it is now also evident that society will not be ready in the foreseeable future to relate in comparable terms the dangers of differing technical solutions to the kinds of activities needed to achieve the optimal relationship between social benefit and possible damage. It is therefore timely to devise some universal concept to describe the influence of the artificial living environment on the conditions for existence that will enable it to be extended to all types of technogenic activity. This essentially means that it is necessary to establish the interrelationship between the stability of complex systems and technogenic risk.Since the evolution of an artificial living environment involves the processes of transmitting matter, energy, and information, thermodynamic concepts can be used to set about analyzing it. The results obtained will then have a great generality and will not require the adoption of simplified models of the systems considered. The thermodynamic approach is valid for any systems that are sufficiently large for fluctuations of their individual microstates to be smoothed out and not too far from equilibrium to enable the nonlinearity of the processes occurring to be neglected. THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE APPROACHLet us consider a thermodynamically open system that consists of physically and chemically inhomogeneous elements which are ordered in a specific way and are specifically related. The lifetime of the elements exceeds the duration of the functioning cycle of the system. This is a general condition for any technogenic systems which contain sensible components or structures. The behavior of these slowly relaxing elements is determined by the structure of the system. By structure we mean the method of organizing the elements and the nature of the coupling between them. Real systems detect the presence of spatial and temporal structures coupled to a dynamic system. The system as a whole, and also the indeterminacy inherent in it, can be characterized by the number of possible states and by the partial probability of realizing these states that fluctuate randomly with time. The syste...

Unique experimental data on the high heat value of biofuels -soy and rapeseed oils and methyl esters of the latter -which are in good agreement with the data of domestic and foreign researchers confirm the results of calculations: high erucic oil and its derivatives have a higher energy potential than low erucic oil. These data allow determining the indicator and effective indexes of operation of diesel (multifuel) engines with a high degree of reliability.With the shortage of liquid energy carriers of petroleum origin and to reduce the environmental hazard of diesel exhaust gases, alternative fuels from renewable feedstock sources -vegetable oils and their derivatives, are beginning to be used.In processing experimental data and calculations of the running cycle of diesel engines, it is important to know the precise value of the low heat value Q l of the fuel. The value of Q l is calculated with the high heat value Q h , which is determined calorimetrically according to GOST 21261"91 in isothermal and adiabatic conditions in a constant volume.The values of Q h and Q l of petroleum fuels and the equations for calculating them are widely known [1], and the experimental values of these quantities were systematized in [2] for biofuels from plant feedstock.Although these values are in satisfactory agreement with the values calculated with Mendeleev's equation, Q h was directly measured with a combustion calorimeter with a V-08MA liquid bomb. S i n c e G O S T 2 1 2 6 1 -9 1 c o v e r s l i q u i d f u e l s a n d h y d r o c a r b o n a n d o x y g e n -c o n t a i n i n g components, the recommended method for determination of Q h can also be considered suitable for oxygen-containing (9-10% O 2 ) vegetable oils and their derivatives.Calorimetric tests of samples of the following fuels [3] were conducted in the Laboratory of Thermal and Thermophysical Measurements at Khar'kov State Scientific-Research Institute of Metrology (KSSRIM): Sample 1 -RME: German rapeseed oil methyl esters, erucic acid C22:1* = 0.6%; density of esters = 877 kg/m 3 at 20°C; Sample 2 -RHRO: refined high erucic rapeseed oil, C22:1 ≈ 30%, density = 916 kg/m 3 at 20°C; *Designation of the erucic acid used in the chemistry of fats: C22 -formula C 22 H 42 O 2 ; the figure 1 after the colon designates the number of double bonds in the molecule. 0009-3092/06/4202-0144

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