Biomimetics

Nature-Inspired Design and Innovation

Sandy B. Primrose

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781119683322
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119683346
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biotechnology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Provides a professional, contemporary, and concise review of the current knowledge and advances in biomimetics

This book covers the field of biomimicry, an area of science where researchers look to mimic aspects of plants or animals in order to solve problems in aerospace, shipping, building, electronics, and optics, among others. It presents the latest developments in biomimicry and gives readers sufficient grounding to help them understand the current, and sometimes technically complex, research literature. Different themes are covered throughout and text boxes deal with the relevant physics for readers who may lack this knowledge. 

Biomimetics: Nature-Inspired Design and Innovation examines issues in fluid dynamics such as avoiding sonic booms, reducing train noise, increasing wind turbine efficiency, and more. Next, it looks at optical applications, e.g. how nature generates color without dyes and pigment, and how animals stay cool in desert environments. A chapter on the built environment discusses cooling systems for buildings based on termite mounds; creating self-cleaning paint based on lotus leaves; unobtrusive solar panels based on ivy; and buildings that respond to the environment. Two more sections focus on biomimicry for the creation of smart materials and smart devices. The book finishes with a look at the field's future over the next decade.

• Presents each topic in sufficient detail in order to enable the reader to comprehend the original scientific papers
• Emphasizes those examples of biomimicry that have made it into products
• Features text boxes that provide information on the relevant physics or engineering principles for biologists who do not have a physics background
• Covers the scientific literature up to July 2019

Biomimetics: Nature-Inspired Design and Innovation is an excellent book for senior undergraduates and post-graduate students in the life sciences, material sciences, and bioengineering. It will also appeal to lay readers with an interest in nature as well as scientists in general.

1
The Beginnings of Biomimetics

It's not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

At its simplest, biomimetics is the design and production of materials, structures, and systems that are modelled on biological entities and processes. The concept of biomimetics stems from the realization that microbes, plants, and animals have been continuously evolving to cope with environmental and other challenges. The design challenges associated with vision, movement in diverse environments, temperature control, and detection of predators and/or prey have already been solved in a myriad ways over millions of years of evolution, providing rich opportunities for development of biomimetic and bioinspired materials. The diversity in form and function of living things is such that they have evolved solutions to most of the challenges that face humans today. We just have to look for those solutions! Janine Benyus pioneered this approach to problem solving in her 1997 book entitled Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature – biomimicry being an alternative name for biomimetics.

The term biomimetics was devised over 40 years ago by American physicist Otto Schmitt. For him, biomimetics represented a biological approach to engineering in contrast to ‘biophysics’, which describes an engineering and physical approach to biology. A related term is ‘bionics’ but, following the 1974 television series The Six Million Dollar Man, this has come to mean electronically operated artificial body parts. In 2015, George Whitesides of Harvard University pointed out that scientists often take inspiration from the capabilities of plants and animals and attempt to mimic some of their functionality using simplified and probably different mechanisms. He calls this ‘bioinspiration’ and defines it as ‘using phenomena in biology to stimulate research in non‐biological research and technology’. The subject matter covered in this book is a mixture of bioinspiration and biomimetics. The novice reader might be interested to know that there is a journal that covers these two topics and, unsurprisingly, it is called Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Benyus has pointed out that there are two types of biomimetics: forward and reverse (Figure 1.1). In forward biomimetics, we see an innovation that has evolved in nature and wonder how we might use it. A good example of this is the invention of Velcro^® (see Section 1.2). In reverse biomimetics, we are faced with a problem and turn to nature for a solution (Figure 1.2). Many examples of this approach are presented in the chapters that follow including the design of the Japanese ‘bullet trains’ (Chapter 2) and glass that prevents bird strikes (Chapter 3).

Figure 1.1 Biomimetics approaches.

Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Biomimicry Institute.

Figure 1.2 How to use reverse biomimicry in product design.

Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Biomimicry Institute.

1.1 Early Attempts at Biomimicry: The Influence of Birds on the Development of Aircraft

The earliest recorded attempts at biomimicry relate to manned flight. The ninth century poet Abbas ibn Firnas and the eleventh century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury attempted to fly by flapping wings that were attached to their arms. In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci began to study the flight of birds. He realized that humans are too heavy, and not strong enough, to fly using wings attached to their arms. He drew sketches of an ornithopter – an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings. The drawings show an aviator lying on a plank of wood and working two large membranous wings using hand levers, foot pedals, and a system of pulleys. There is no record of da Vinci constructing and testing such a device but, in 1841, a man called Manojlo did just that. He took off from the roof of the Dumrukhana (Import Tax Office) in Belgrade and fortuitously survived as he landed in a heap of snow. We will return to the concept of ornithopters in Chapter 2.

The first person to make well‐documented, repeated, successful flights was Otto Lilienthal. A German pioneer of aviation, he became known as the ‘flying man’. Initially he tried, like others before him, to fly by flapping wings he had strapped to his arms. After training as an engineer, he began to study the flight of birds, especially storks, and described the aerodynamics of their wings. Based on this research on bird flight, he developed a glider in which he could change the centre of gravity by shifting his body, much as hang gliders do today. Unfortunately, his gliders were difficult to manoeuvre and tended to pitch down, leading to loss of flight. One reason for this was that he held the glider by his shoulders rather than hanging from it like a modern hang glider. Only his legs and lower body could be moved and this limited the amount of weight shift that could be achieved. Nevertheless, in 1893 he achieved flight distances of up to 820 feet (250 m). He had a total flying time of five hours by the time he died in a gliding crash in 1896.

Across the Atlantic in Dayton, Ohio (USA), brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright were reading about the exploits of Otto Lilienthal and his flights in gliders. They later said that Lilienthal's death was the catalyst for their own work on manned flight. Soon they were reading everything they could find about aeronautics, including the work of the ‘father of aviation’, Sir George Cayley. Cayley identified the four forces that act on a heavier‐than‐air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag, and thrust. Modern aeroplane design is based on these discoveries and on the importance of having a curvature of the upper surface of the wings (Chapter 2, Some basic fluid dynamics box). In 1799, long before Lilienthal, Caley may have designed the first glider to carry a human aloft but this has not been verified.

One advantage the Wright brothers had over their predecessors who were attempting flight was the recent invention of the internal combustion engine. This could be used to generate the thrust that was clearly not possible using flapping wings. Despite Lilienthal's fate, the Wright brothers practised gliding so they could master the art of control before attempting motor‐driven flight. They realized that Lilienthal's use of shifting body weight to change direction was inadequate. Wilbur had spent a lot of time observing birds and he noted that they changed the angle of the ends of their wings to make their bodies turn left or right. The brothers puzzled over how this could be achieved and eventually came up with wing distortion or ‘wing‐warping’. In July 1899 the concept of wing warping was put to the test in a biplane kite with a five‐foot wingspan. When the wings were twisted in opposite directions, the unequal lift made the kite turn in the direction of the lower end.

Two further modifications were made to the early gliders. To protect the pilot from a nosedive and crash like the one that killed Lilienthal, the Wright brothers mounted an elevator at the front of the glider. By moving the elevator, they could make the craft go up or down as they wished. In early flights, they noticed that wing warping created a differential drag at the wingtips. Greater lift at one end of the wing also increased drag. This slowed that end of the wing, making the glider swivel so that the nose pointed away from the turn (‘yawing’). This was corrected by adding a rear rudder. Once they had mastered flying in their gliders, the Wright brothers added engine‐powered propellers and made the first ever powered, manned flight in December 1903.

In mid‐1910, the Wright brothers made a further change to the design of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Beginnings of Biomimetics
• 2 Transport, Motion, and Energy
• 3 Colour and Light
• 4 The Built Environment
• 5 Smart Materials
• 6 Smart Devices
• 7 The Influence of Biology on Computer Science
• 8 The Future of Biomimetics
• Index
• End User License Agreement