Function-based, biologically inspired concept generation

Abstract

The natural world provides numerous cases for inspiration in engineering design. Biological organisms, phenomena, and strategies, which we refer to as biological systems, provide a rich set of analogies. These systems provide insight into sustainable and adaptable design and offer engineers billions of years of valuable experience, which can be used to inspire engineering innovation. This research presents a general method for functionally representing biological systems through systematic design techniques, leading to the conceptualization of biologically inspired engineering designs. Functional representation and abstraction techniques are used to translate biological systems into an engineering context. The goal is to make the biological information accessible to engineering designers who possess varying levels of biological knowledge but have a common understanding of engineering design. Creative or novel engineering designs may then be discovered through connections made between biology and engineering. To assist with making connections between the two domains concept generation techniques that use biological information, engineering knowledge, and automatic concept generation software are employed. Two concept generation approaches are presented that use a biological model to discover corresponding engineering components that mimic the biological system and use a repository of engineering and biological information to discover which biological components inspire functional solutions to fulfill engineering requirements. Discussion includes general guidelines for modeling biological systems at varying levels of fidelity, advantages, limitations, and applications of this research. The modeling methodology and the first approach for concept generation are illustrated by a continuous example of lichen.

Bionic design methodology for wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment

“…Nine systematic bionic design methodologies were found in Vincent et al (2006), Torben (2009), Nagel et al (2010), Versos (2011), and Kore, Sakri, and Karadi (2014), all of which have either explicitly or implicitly incorporated the bionic design principle of biological function analysis. However, only the bionic design methodology in Kore, Sakri, and Karadi (2014) is based on structural bionics.…”

“…Hence, these methodologies must be more specific in order to use biological morphologies for the wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment surfaces. Therefore, on the basis of the bionic design methodology in Kore, Sakri, and Karadi (2014), we incorporate the bionic design principles such as biological scale analysis from Nagel et al (2010) and implementation of TRIZ from Vincent et al (2006), as well as an optimal design method of D-optimum theory (Ren et al 1995;Ren et al 2002). A bionic design methodology for wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment surface is formulated, consisting of five steps:…”

“…One can also refer to the available textbook for biological functions (Torben 2009;Nagel et al 2010). …”

DTM at 25: Essays on Themes and Future Directions

“…The variety of functional reasoning approaches (see [111, 112, e.g.] for a summary), the areas within which they are explored (e.g., in product or system architecture by Stone [44], in biologically inspired design [105,113,114,115], in computational synthesis [116,117,118,119,120,121], in design by analogy and analogical reasoning [122,123,96,124,125], and in efficient sharing and search [126,127,128]) are testimony to the prolific research in the area of function. A summary of functional representation approaches can be found in two special issues of AIEDAM [129,130,131], and a summary of major approaches within the other two tasks can be found in [111,132,112].…”

Guard Cell and Tropomyosin Inspired Chemical Sensor

“…All models created with this method use the Functional Basis modeling lexicon [52]. When following the solution-driven route, the designer can refer to the general biological modeling methodology presented in [53] for assistance with creating a biological functional model.…”