Biomimetic principles and design

Seminars: 1 session / week. 2 hours / session.

None. This is a Freshman Advising Seminar.

Vogel, Steven. Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN: 9780393319903.

Biomimesis is the scientific method of learning new principles and processes based on systematic study, observation and experimentation with live animals and organisms.

This course will familiarize you with some of the processes and methods of establishing principles through observations, experimentation, and constructing models of living organisms. We concentrate on mechanical, chemical and biological aspects of live animals. The principal purpose of the class is to make you confident enough to tackle biomimetically problems where you do not have the necessary background, i.e. become detectives of the physical world (reverse engineering).

This does not mean that the task is easier. In many cases it is far easier to evoke basic physical laws and theories and find the solution. You will realize that you must go through a lot of reading of (often obscure) literature before you can use your biomimetic skills. The importance of biomimesis is that it is often the only way to progress, particularly when complexity is forbidding.

Although the basic laws of nature are known, at least in mechanics, complex living systems present macroscopic behaviors which are hard to understand, and may contain principles undetected by classical mechanics. Biomimesis is useful in identifying basic principles hidden within complex behaviors. The basic conjecture is that evolution identifies in the long run optimal solutions; hence animals have achieved a perfection of function that can be studied and replicated.

Biomimetics are used today to advance the state of the art, i.e. to find novel principles and processes, which are extremely hard to find otherwise. The methodologies can be taught directly to a certain degree, but can mostly be taught only through example. A way to imitate the research biomimetic effort is to assume (or pretend) little knowledge of mechanics and try to learn from the animal world—biomimetically—basic scientific findings and truths.

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