Exergy analysis for resource conversion of the Chinese Society 1993 under the material product system * B. Chen, G.Q. Chen * National Laboratory for Complex Systems and Turbulence, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Received 25 March 2005; revised 30 May 2005; accepted 28 June 2005 Abstract The resource exergy conversion in Chinese society in 1993 under the material product system (MPS) was investigated. Major resources that entered the society were divided into subgroups and analyzed in detail. The end use was broken down into ten end-use sectors: the forestry industry, food industry, iron and steel industry, nonferrous metal industry, chemical industry, textile industry, transportation, households, commerce, other industry. The total exergy input was 62.9 EJ, which was 53.3 GJ/cap. The total exergy output contained 11.66 EJ or 9.88 GJ/cap, which was 19% of the total exergy input. One RMB (Chinese Renminbi) yuan ($ 0.17) corresponded to 3.37 MJ resource exergy output. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The driving force behind the social-economic-ecological complex system of a society are its resources, which pose unparalleled challenges on every level. The quantity and quality scarcities of the diverse resources require an efficient, effective and interdependent utilization based on overall and unified accounting. Exergy for a given system is defined as the maximal amount of work that can be extracted from the system in the process of reaching equilibrium with its local environment, chosen to have a direct bearing Energy 31 (2006) 1115–1150 www.elsevier.com/locate/energy 0360-5442/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.energy.2005.06.003 * Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 10372006) and the Doctoral Training Programme in Higher Education (Grant No. 2002001035). * Corresponding author. Tel.: C86 1062767167; fax: C86 1062750416. E-mail address: gqchen@pku.edu.cn (G.Q. Chen).