Escaping the Labyrinth of Bioinspiration: Biodiversity as Key to Successful Product Innovation

Broeckhoven, Chris; Plessis, Anton du

doi:10.1002/adfm.202110235

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Besides the environmental context, it is important to consider that organismal design is not a result of an effective optimisation process or the best absolute solution in terms of functional efficiency; its evolution is determined by several constraints [ 18 , 32 , 33 ]. Accordingly, many organismal traits can easily invalidate the biomimetic transfer, constituting real traps for design projects (see Section 2.1.2 ).…”

Section: Disciplinary Transfer Of Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Paleomimetics: A Conceptual Framework for a Biomimetic Design Inspired by Fossils and Evolutionary Processes

et al. 2022

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In biomimetic design, functional systems, principles, and processes observed in nature are used for the development of innovative technical systems. The research on functional features is often carried out without giving importance to the generative mechanism behind them: evolution. To deeply understand and evaluate the meaning of functional morphologies, integrative structures, and processes, it is imperative to not only describe, analyse, and test their behaviour, but also to understand the evolutionary history, constraints, and interactions that led to these features. The discipline of palaeontology and its approach can considerably improve the efficiency of biomimetic transfer by analogy of function; additionally, this discipline, as well as biology, can contribute to the development of new shapes, textures, structures, and functional models for productive and generative processes useful in the improvement of designs. Based on the available literature, the present review aims to exhibit the potential contribution that palaeontology can offer to biomimetic processes, integrating specific methodologies and knowledge in a typical biomimetic design approach, as well as laying the foundation for a biomimetic design inspired by extinct species and evolutionary processes: Paleomimetics. A state of the art, definition, method, and tools are provided, and fossil entities are presented as potential role models for technical transfer solutions.

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Section: Disciplinary Transfer Of Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Paleomimetics: A Conceptual Framework for a Biomimetic Design Inspired by Fossils and Evolutionary Processes

et al. 2022

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“…This harbours the danger of considering the need to understand biology as a distraction rather than an asset (all the more so because real interdisciplinary cooperation can be strenuous due to differences in terminology, approaches and mentalities). In fact, there is increasing concern that an inadequate understanding of biology and insufficient evaluation of the richness of biological model systems and functional contexts will suppress the full potential of biomimetics [ 1 , 7 , 13 , 49 ]. The presented project example supports these claims.…”

Section: Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The complexity of the relationships between biology and technical applications leads to a high diversity of biomimetic projects with respect to procedures, strategies, project course and history [ 11 – 12 ]. Moreover, the biological model system and its functional aspects and contexts may not be fully understood and/or unraveled [ 1 , 7 , 13 – 14 ]. This hampers easy one-to-one translations of a (presumed) biological function to a technical solution or may even lead to potential conflicts with the originally intended technical application.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Straight roads into nowhere – obvious and not-so-obvious biological models for ferrophobic surfaces

Konrad¹,

Neinhuis²,

Roth‐Nebelsick³

2022

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol.

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There are currently efforts to improve strategies for biomimetic approaches, to identify pitfalls and to provide recommendations for a successful biomimetic work flow. In this contribution, a case study of a concrete biomimetic project is described that started with a posed technical problem for which seemingly obvious biological models exist. The technical problem was to devise a ferrophobic surface that prevents the contact between the copper surface of a tuyère (a water cooled aeration pipe within a blast furnace) and liquid iron. Therefore, biological external surfaces that strongly repel liquids appeared to be suitable, particularly the hair cover of the water fern Salvinia molesta and the surface of Collembola (an arthropod group). It turned out, however, that it was not feasible to realise the functional structures of both biological models for the tuyère problem. Instead, a seemingly not obvious biological model was identified, namely micropores within the cell walls of water-transporting conduits of plants that connect the conduits to a three-dimensional flow network. These specially shaped pores are assumed to be able to create stable air bodies, which support the refilling of embolised conduits. By adopting the shape of these micropores, a successful prototype for a ferrophobic copper surface repelling liquid iron could be devised. This case study illustrates that straight road maps from technical problems to obvious biological models are no guarantee for success, and that it is difficult to arrive at a formalised biomimetic working scheme. Rather, a broad understanding of biological function and its complexity is beneficial.

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“…Furthermore, Broeckhoven and du Plessis (2022) highlight that most bio-inspired designs are based on a limited number of highly publicized organisms. To counteract this, they proposed to digitize existing Natural History collections and look at more biodiverse organisms in the search for inspiration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free-text inspiration search for systematic bio-inspiration support of engineering design

Willocx

Duflou

2023

AIEDAM

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Current supportive bio-inspired design methods focus on handcrafting the inspiration engineers use to speed up bio-inspired design. However promising, such methods are not scalable as the time investment is shifted to an up-front investment. Furthermore, most proposed methods require the engineer to adopt a new design process. The current study presents FISh, a scalable search method based on the standard engineering design process. By leveraging machine translation between a representative corpus of biological and engineering texts, the engineer can start the search using engineering terminology, which, behind the scenes, is automatically converted to a biological query. This conversion is done using language models trained on patents and biological publications for the engineering and biology domains. Both models are aligned using the most used English words. The biological query is used to retrieve biological documents that describe the most relevant functionality for the engineering query. The presented method allows searching for bio-inspiration using a free-text query. Furthermore, updating the underlying datasets, models and organism aspects is automated, allowing the system to stay up to date without requiring interactive effort. Finally, the search functionality is validated by comparing the search results for the functionality of existing bio-inspired designs with their inspiring organisms.

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Escaping the Labyrinth of Bioinspiration: Biodiversity as Key to Successful Product Innovation

Cited by 19 publications

References 68 publications

Paleomimetics: A Conceptual Framework for a Biomimetic Design Inspired by Fossils and Evolutionary Processes

Paleomimetics: A Conceptual Framework for a Biomimetic Design Inspired by Fossils and Evolutionary Processes

Straight roads into nowhere – obvious and not-so-obvious biological models for ferrophobic surfaces

Free-text inspiration search for systematic bio-inspiration support of engineering design

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