Events Blog

Biomimicry

Walraj Singh Gosal - 19.06.2012

Learning from nature’s 3.8 billion year investment in R&D

Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral observed something curious upon returning from a trip in the Alps in 1941. His clothes and dog were covered in burs of the plant cocklebur. Upon microscopic examination, he observed hundreds of hooks that in the wild allow the seeds to stick to animal fur and disperse to hopefully more fertile land. Convinced that this clever trick from biology could be translated into a novel fastener, he refined his discovery over ten years and eventually filed a patent in 1951 for a synthetic fastener.

Although not initially a success, in the 1960s, success came following media attention after NASA used his product to secure small objects such as pens on the Apollo space shuttles. In 2008, celebrating its 50^th year, his company Velcro Industries achieved global sales of $298 million.

But George de Mestral perhaps left us with a greater legacy than Velcro itself. Biomimicry - a discipline that looks to biology and the 3.8 billion year history of trial and error, for inspiration to solve some of today's  design and engineering problems - is the theme of our latest event 'Biomimicry: Biology inspires innovation' on Thursday 5 July 2012, in our ongoing 'Hot Topics' series.

Biomimicry may have had humble beginnings in Velcro, but the solutions it has inspired since are anything but. Take for example the Japanese 500-series Shinkansen bullet train. In order to minimise noise, especially when the train travels through a tunnel, engineer Eiji Nakatsu took inspiration from biology after a chance meeting with aviation expert who had an interest in birds, and modelled the train's nose after the Kingfisher's beak. Kingfishers dive fast into water without making a splash by allowing the water to flow past the beak rather than being forced in front of it. It was this movement from a low-resistance to a high-resistance medium that caught the eye of Eiji Nakatsu. A high-speed train moving through a tunnel faces a similar challenge, producing a sonic boom that can be felt by residents as far as 400 meters away. The new shape of the Shinkansen's nose eliminates this problem.

But the intimate link between biology and the Shinkansen train does not end there. Eiji Nakatsu and a team of engineers intrigued by the possibilities of biomimicry, also looked at one of the most silent flyers in biology to see if there was anything more to learn. Using a series of wind tunnel tests using a stuffed owl borrowed from the Osaka Municipal Tennoji Zoo, the team analysed noise levels and learned that the owl's secret to silent flying lay in a series of saw-toothed feathers. These special feathers appeared to generate small vortices in the air flow that limit the ability of larger noise-producing vortices building up. After a four-year effort, the engineers put this biological solution into practice, redesigning the train's pantograph (the rod that connects the train to the overhead electricity cables) to have serrations to mimic such feathers. Taken together, these biomimicry innovations allow the new Shinkansen train to not only travel faster, but more quietly while using 15 per cent less electricity.

Indeed, this flagship example of biomimicry is joined by a plethora of others. One example is the Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe which was modelled after the nests of Africa's indigenous termites. The building employs a natural cooling solution which eliminates the need for a costly and energy-hungry air conditioning system. Another is the swim suit that Michael Phelps wore during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Working with shark experts at the Natural History Museum in London, designers at Speedo were able to produce a fabric that was modelled on the tiny microscopic 'dermal denticles' used by Sharks to decrease drag and turbulence around their bodies.

In the future, with engineers and designers looking for more efficient and sustainable solutions, biomimicry is likely to play an ever more important role in innovation. But the existing repertoire of successes in biomimicry raises important questions about how innovation is currently delivered and whether this will suffice in the future. For example, how does specialist knowledge and ideas flow from biology to engineering and product design and what are the current tools and institutions that enable this process?

To explore these themes, Nesta is hosting a breakfast event, 'Biomimicry: Biology inspires innovation' on Thursday 5 July 2012, as part of our popular 'Hot Topics' series. Our panel of speakers to debate these themes are Rob Kesseler (Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design), Alex Parfitt (BAE Systems) and Denise DeLuca (Swedish Biomimetics 3000). Registration information can be found here.