About
Biomimicry — the design of materials, structures, and systems inspired by biological systems that have been optimized by evolution over millions of years — has produced many of the 20th and 21st century's most innovative engineering solutions. Evolution, acting over billions of years on an almost infinite number of trials, has solved engineering problems that human designers had struggled with for decades.
Examples: velcro (1941, George de Mestral, inspired by burdock burrs' hooked seeds attaching to his dog's fur — he examined them under a microscope and replicated the hook-and-loop structure); Japan's Shinkansen bullet train nose (engineer Eiji Nakatsu, an avid birdwatcher, redesigned the train's nose after the Kingfisher's beak — which enters water with minimal splash because its beak profile gradually displaces water; the redesigned train was 15% faster, used 15% less electricity, and eliminated the sonic boom when exiting tunnels); shark skin surface patterns (riblets reducing turbulent drag — applied to Olympic swimsuits before being banned; applied to airplane surfaces); lotus leaf superhydrophobicity (self-cleaning surface inspired by lotus leaf nanostructure — applied to self-cleaning glass, textiles); and spider silk (5x stronger than steel at 1/5th the weight — being replicated for body armor and medical sutures).
# Top 10 biomimicry facts
- 1velcro (burdock burrs)
- 2Shinkansen nose (kingfisher beak)
- 3shark skin riblets (drag reduction)
- 4lotus effect (self-cleaning surfaces)
- 5spider silk (stronger than steel)
- 6gecko adhesion (dry adhesives from van der Waals forces)
- 7bird flocking algorithms (computer graphics, self-driving cars)
- 8whale fin tubercles (wind turbine blades)
- 9bee honeycomb (optimal structure)
- 10termite mound cooling (Eastgate Centre, Zimbabwe)
Fascinating Facts
- ◆The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe (architect Mick Pearce, 1996) was designed based on termite mound ventilation — termites maintain constant temperature in their mounds by opening and closing ventilation channels in response to external temperature; the building uses the same principle with no air conditioning, using 90% less energy than comparable buildings
- ◆Eiji Nakatsu redesigned the Shinkansen bullet train's nose based on the kingfisher's beak after the train was causing sonic booms when exiting tunnels; the kingfisher's beak profile gradually displaces water without a splash as it dives, and the train nose redesign eliminated the boom while making the train 15% faster and 15% more energy efficient
- ◆Whale fin tubercles — the bumps on humpback whale pectoral fins — inspired wind turbine blade designs that are 20% more efficient and stall less sharply in turbulent conditions; the bumps create small vortices that energize the boundary layer and delay flow separation, a discovery that was completely counterintuitive before observing whale hydrodynamics
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